


The Sweetest Sorrow

by AParisianShakespearean



Category: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption 2
Genre: Blood and Injury, Bonding, Camping, Chivalry, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Smut, F/M, Falling In Love, Fishing, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Reading, Romance, Sexual Tension, Slight Canon Divergence, Slow Burn, Touch-Starved, Universe Alteration, Wilderness Survival, tending injuries
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2019-10-14 04:09:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 43,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17501282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AParisianShakespearean/pseuds/AParisianShakespearean
Summary: She burned for him, the man who had become her knight. Though Arthur wore no silver armor, Charlotte burned as she saw his loneliness and his troubles. And as they help each other and learn from each other, they taste that sweet sorrow that doesn't quell the burn.***A look into the kinship Charlotte Balfour develops with Arthur Morgan.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I intend for this to be a short chaptered fic with six chapters at the most, and I will see to update consistently...though I am a woman of many WIPs. However, like many a cowgirl I know, playing Red Dead Redemption 2 left me with some Arthur Morgan feels(tm) that needed to be explored. 
> 
> Anyway, please enjoy :)
> 
> edit as of 2/27/19: it will be longer than 6 chapter friends :)

Charlotte Vale’s hands were dainty and soft. A lady’s hands, “your father has money hands,” her brother said in jest once or twice, but the biggest sin of Charlotte Vale and then Balfour’s hands were that they betrayed a dull and uneventful life. Needlework and embroidery gave her pricked fingers, and once she may have fancied them battle scars and wounds. Once, she thought a lot of things. But even with the little pinpricks here and there, they were still soft, privileged hands that had not lived.

Cal liked her hands. In a crowd of people at the Palmer House, he first held them in his broad palms. They were soft yes, but harder than hers still, she recalled thinking. She was dressed in blue silks, a gift her father brought from a Paris salon, and Cal smiled at her and asked not with his words but with his coffee-colored eyes if she may take off her lacy glove off, so he may bestow a kiss to her bare skin, like she was a lady-fair and he was a knight. He noted and commented then how her eyes lit up at the mention. He bragged he took her for a reader of stories of old when he first laid eyes on her. An adventurer, different from other ladies.

Perhaps I’m not so different, she said. Perhaps everyone longed for some sort of adventure. She just sought hers in books, dreaming of knights and discovery away from the frivolity she was born into, because that was all she had. He said he was the same, and she let him hold and kiss her hand.

Six months later, Cal, after asking her father for permission on a rainy Sunday in their town home, asked Charlotte if they could be their own sort of different together. On their wedding day in early spring, another few months later, she took his hand and said softly she was forever his.

He held her hand as it rained outside, in their little cabin north of Annesburg. Charlotte held his longer after, even after it went limp. The man held some semblance of Cal but it wasn’t Cal. Her Cal had rosy cheeks and merry eyes. The man that she was left with was only a husk—a body, Cal gone somewhere else. She hoped heaven. When they left Chicago she thought they were going to a heavenly paradise. The cabin and the woodlands nearby, the river looked as she imagined Heaven to look when they first arrived months before they finally moved. At last they said when they declared they would have it with their hands joined and clasped together, because they were always joined, they had something that was theirs. They had something real.

Something real. Those were her bitter thoughts when she dug his grave south of their home and brought him there, felt the earth and soiled her once dainty and elegant hands. In a moment of irony, the earth in her palms and between her fingers, she thought of how she always wanted to play in the dirt as a child, but her mother always stopped her. It would ruin her dress, she always protested. Even in Charlotte’s young mind she detested the grand buildings, the fine antique imports from Europe her father collected. She preferred flowers and grass and trees, thinking those real when everything else wasn’t.

It was real, to feel the earth in her hands, where life grew. She had no coffin for him, only the earth. She had no cross either, but she took two wooden planks and a hammer and she made the makeshift cross. She had no garland of flowers, only wildflowers. Even as the tears still pooled and stained her ruddy cheeks, and they didn’t cease at all during those three days, some part of her that never let those books and novels go took that realest feeling of hurt and loneliness she had ever felt and kept it close to her heart.

On the cross she had it carved— _Cal Balfour, husband_. He was real. She hoped, even if it was a hundred years from then, that a kind stranger would find her and bury her next to him, and carved on her cross that she was real too. At least then, she wouldn’t be lonely anymore.

She felt loneliness in Chicago but it was a different kind of loneliness. It was being in a crowd of people and screaming on the inside with no one else coming to comfort her. She could scream and scream, she realized. No one would hear, but she didn’t anyway. She didn’t scream, only wept silent tears that no one would hear.

Not until someone did.

He startled her at first. She could not see his face or his eyes, only his brown and blonde colored whiskers and that there was nothing in his hands. He wore a tan and worn jacket, a blue collared shirt underneath with the color washed away. Her sister in law warned her and Cal of outlaws and thieves after her original warnings of wild animals didn’t deter either of them (She still had to send the letter, she realized, with the grim and ironic truth of the matter of the bear that ended him.) Either way, Charlotte heard stories, and when there he was, an outlaw or a wanted man, she all but threw her hands up in the air and admitted that if he killed her, she would have died anyway. Her food rations of canned peaches, strawberries and salted meats were dwindling, and her and Cal had not thought to buy a horse to travel to Annesburg. Not that it would do any good if they had one. When they toyed with the idea of getting one in the Van Horn stables, she got up on a Tennessee Walker and couldn’t even begin to ride because she was too high off the ground. She couldn’t hunt and her only talent was finding poison berries that burned her insides and would not go away until she drank a tonic. Perhaps it would have been a better way to die, gunned down near Cal’s grave than to slowly deteriorate from starvation. Either way, she wasn’t going back to Chicago, and when he offered to take her to a train station, she told him no.

He didn’t laugh or mock, think her insane for remaining alone. Instead, he offered to teach her how to hunt.

“No funny business,” she ordered. “I know how I look, but I can defend myself.”

“I don’t doubt it ma’am.”

He kept a respectful distance as he led her away from Cal’s grave. She watched him as he watched the land he took her too, a good spot for hunting, he said. Though he wore a hat she could get a better look at his well-worn face, slightly pink from the sun. Like her he hadn’t seen a tub of water in months. But he killed a rabbit for her, and showed her how to skin it for the pelt and for the meat. He didn’t laugh when her first and second tug did nothing, nor did he laugh when she shut her eyes tight and pulled with all her might, all but jump for joy when she finally removed the pelt. He escorted her home and listened to her talk of privileges and the money her and Cal’s family had, and how they wanted to abandon it all for something real. He didn’t laugh when she insisted she didn’t want him to take her to the station again, the idea of getting on a horse again not the only reason, and when she spotted two grey wolves on the top of the hill, he defended her.

“It’s alright,” he called, Charlotte hiding from behind a tree when they wolves descended the hill. “They’re dead now.”

It was useless to say she would have died had he not been there, but she did anyway, and she thanked him again before he led her back to the cabin. He suggested he start using her husband’s rifle. She agreed.

“This is a good spot,” he said on the way back, the two climbing the hill. “Remote, and a good water source. You could survive here all right.”

“I have no doubt one could,” Charlotte replied. “Whether or not Charlotte Balfour can is another matter entirely.”

He didn’t dispute it, but his manner indicated that he held some semblance of faith, something too many didn’t have in her, even Cal. Are you sure you want to do this Charlotte? He asked the day before they left. You’ve never left the city. Unfortunately his childhood summers spent in remote Maine left him as prepared as Charlotte in the end.

Her kind stranger however had not once argued with her, insist that she leave or suggest she couldn’t do it. She suspected he may have had more faith than she did. He held something few men in the city ever held, a respect that made her think he had lived in the outdoors all his life. In the indolent city where one didn’t have to think about what the next meal would be, or even if one would have a next meal, there was time to assign and play roles. Here, were there were no roles to play, he saw her as only another being that needed help.

Even then, he didn’t need to help her. He did.

“So, you came from Chicago?” he asked, making polite conversation. He had a gravely voice that should have been unpleasant, but she enjoyed listening to it all the same.

“Yes,” she replied. “Have you been there?”

“Just passed through.”

“Oh. Business or pleasure?”

“Business you could say. Banking mostly.”

Cal was in banking. She wondered if they had ever crossed paths. “I doubt it,” he replied, and she couldn’t see his eyes underneath his wide brimmed hat. “I was more on the withdrawal side.”

She froze before coming back, understanding. “Oh. You’re teasing me.”

“Something like that.”

He was sheepish. She may have been privileged but she wasn’t naïve. Vaguely too, she recalled an incident at Cal’s bank a few years prior. When her stranger finally looked at her, the two engaging in a stand-off of sort, his eyes asked when he didn’t if he was going to judge her. Maybe once she would have. But there, in a place that looked like heaven but could be certain hell, there was no time for judgement. He was only a person who helped her.

“I’d invite you in,” she said as she opened her door and he stood by the steps. “But I’m a little dead on my feet, if you’ll forgive the pun. With some food and washing, I’ll be a new woman. But do call again sometime, please.”

“I’ll try ma’am.”

She didn’t go in, not yet. He didn’t leave, not yet. He cleared his throat. He told her he was sorry for her loss.

“He would have wanted me to stay,” Charlotte said.

“Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” she said, without a moment’s pause.

He might have questioned if she was too prideful or if she had no common sense. Yet he only smiled and asked if the city was really that bad.

“Yes, it is that bad,” she said, chuckling, and the sound was so foreign to her after not hearing it for so long.

He chuckled too. “I don’t doubt it.”

He tried to hide his small cough before he turned to leave. Yet before he left the premise she recalled one thing. She didn’t know his name.

“Arthur,” he replied when she asked, and when the name conjured images of knights and round tables, she proclaimed he was like King Arthur then.

“I don’t know about that,” he replied, and for the first time since they made acquaintances, he took off his hat. It struck her then how young he was, but how this place that looked like heaven could but be as brutal as hell had worn and whittled him, yet he still stood tall and proud. Handsome in a certain sense, not classically so like she would have called Cal, but one an artist would choose as a subject to paint, because something lay ingrained underneath his eyes. And his hands, Charlotte noted, gaze darting there, they showed a life that lived.

“I do,” she said.

When she closed the door behind her, and went to bed with a full belly, she looked at her dirty hands in the candlelight. Even though there were marks and calluses, dirt underneath her fingernails, she had never been prouder of them and what they had accomplished.

Both she and Arthur had hands that had lived.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMPORTANT, FORGOT TO MENTION LAST UPDATE, I’m moving things around to flesh out Charlotte and Arthur’s relationship and give it some more screen time than what we get in game. In game Arthur can meet Charlotte starting in chapter five and into six, but for this story, I’m moving their initial encounter (my chapter one) into Arthur’s middle chapter 3. This chapter takes place later in, sometime before the shootout at Shady Belle when the gang looks for Jack. With the rest it should be easy to figure out the general time and with what's going on.

The rifle was a heavy thing, something Cal only had for show before they decided to start anew and leave Chicago. It took Charlotte nearly an hour for her to open the rifle and place the cartridges inside, and she screamed so loud the nearby deer likely darted away when she shot a bullet straight into the wooden planks underneath her. Heart beating like mad, she took a deep breath to calm herself, grateful she didn’t lose a foot. She was even more grateful the bullet didn’t ricochet backward into her head. The wilderness was already making her lose her mind. Then again, many would have said she lost that when she and Cal decided to leave their old lives. The rest would have said it after learning she decided to stay in the wilderness without him. In fact, Charlotte was certain there was only one who would have had the decency not to remind her of her insanity, though she was also certain the gallant Arthur drew the line somewhere. She suspected it would have been her poor aim with the rifle.

It didn’t take long for Arthur to shoot those wolves that caught wind of their scent after he killed the rabbit for her, but two hours and boxes upon boxes of used rifle cartridges later, Charlotte wasn’t any closer to hitting one of the bottles she set up for target practice. And they were stationary—deer and rabbits in the wild, (or the unthinkable, wolves and bears) moved. Rather fast as well. She was being careful with the rabbit, salting it and making stew of some, but sooner rather than later it would run out, and she would be under imminent doom. She needed to hunt. She needed to be able to hit something with Cal’s rifle, or she may as well already make her grave.

She tried not to think about that too hard. Only aimed, or at least made an attempt at it, pulled the trigger, missed, and tried again, and again, and again. Once she became so angry she shot a full cartridge one right after the other, that if there were people nearby they would have ran suspecting a shoot-out or robbery was occurring. She may still not have hit a single one, but she did learn shooting was a remarkable way to release her frustrations. Helpless, she was going to call it a day, until Arthur saw to it that she didn’t.

On his salt and pepper colored horse, he trotted up to her gate before dismounting, asking if she was doing alright. She kept to herself how glad she was that they managed to make acquaintances again, and how she hoped the gentlemanly and knightly ways she witnessed the last time he arrived continued and compelled him enough to shoot another rabbit for her. Arthur however, not content to feed her for only one day again, gave her something better. He taught her how to shoot, to feed her for life.

He didn’t know much about Aristotle he said, when Charlotte recalled a quote drilled into her head long ago, but he knew how to shoot. He put his large hands on her shoulders. She felt where she had lost weight since arriving and the soft press of his digits against her, simultaneously easing her and pulling her body upward. She had been slumped over she realized, perhaps in a small act of rebellion from her younger years when she couldn’t sit at a table without her mother demanding she sit up straight. Standing taller she felt the control, and even if she hadn’t gotten a single shot all day, his hands on her shoulders renewed her, giving her more vigor to take on those devious bottles and cans.

“Always pull the trigger on empty lungs,” Arthur said. “Here, let me show you.”

With his revolver, he effortless aimed and hit on his first try. He paused after, and there was a moment where he touched his shoulder and grimaced, shuffling some. She asked if he was alright.

“Fine,” he said. “Here, watch.”

She had a worry the whole thing would turn into a show of male dominance, Arthur hitting bottle after bottle, but he surprised her by missing one. It was odd, he seemed to have it perfectly aligned before he moved suddenly and the bullet missed, but she informed him anyway that knowing even he could miss every once in a while, made her feel better.

“It happens,” he said with a small shrug.

They took turns. He killed the rat that she and Cal could never get as it scurried from under the porch to the outhouse. She thanked him profusely, not informing him she could finally get a decent sleep, as before she was too afraid of the thing crawling on her in the middle of the night. Mind cleared, she did as he said and positioned Cal’s rifle again. She took a deep breath. aimed, and though the rifle kicked back and jerked into her shoulder, though the thing was heavy, and though she was an insane woman who was over her head for thinking she could live alone in the wilderness, she emptied her lungs and shot. The glass shattered.

“I did it!” she exclaimed, nearly bouncing on the balls of her feet. “I did it!”

“You did.”

She couldn’t have done it without him. Not once but twice he took the time to help her when others didn’t. “Thank you, thank you!” she said, and he merely took off his hat and scratched the back of his head, as if words of thanks wasn’t something he was accustomed to. Closer to him than she had been previous, she was reminded of what was before, and saw what she hadn’t seen before. In the city there were so many faces, one could never possibly remember all, or even most. There were only a few that Charlotte knew she could paint to canvas if she had the tools or the skill, with every detail exactly as how they would have appeared in life. Her mother and father (both with their grim and stern faces) her brother (a jovial smile) and Cal, eyes to the distance, dreaming of something bigger than himself, too optimistic for the cynical world.

Charlotte studied Arthur. He couldn’t have been that much older than her, and though her mother, who wanted grandchildren, liked to inform her the obvious, fact she wasn’t getting any younger, Charlotte had only lived for thirty years. Arthur may have had more physical years than she, but he had hundreds of years of so much living she didn’t know but wanted to know, when she had so few. Cal passing aged her some, yes. She aged a lifetime when she brought him home after the bear attack and told him he would be alright, and he only shook his head and asked for her to hold him. She aged another lifetime when she buried him. Still not so much as others, not yet.

There was an old Mr. Jenkins, the man who oversaw the library in Chicago. He had always been one of her dearest friends, and he came to the city from the frontier, spending most of his life there. “You don’t live there without loss Charlotte,” he said. “Not as long as I have.” Arthur, she knew, from the way he held his gun and from the way he stood in the open field, not timid and meek but ready, she knew he had to have lived most of his life that way. He must have had loses. It was impossible not to. That, coupled with hard living, gave him so many more lifetimes than anyone else she had ever known.

It would have been difficult to depict his likeness in art because of his extra years, and she had not the tools nor the skill. Still, she was certain she would have been able to make his likeness with stunning clarity, even another lifetime from were they stood. Pinpointing an expression would have been difficult, for she didn’t know him the way she knew others, the way she wanted to. Yet she could still paint him, had she the tools or the skill.

She invited him for leftover rabbit stew. He obliged, following her inside and taking a seat when she offered. Her home was far smaller than her parent’s home, and smaller than her and Cal’s townhome as well—only furnished with what was needed to live and nothing more. Her father would have walked in and called the place a garish cave. That was why she treasured it all the more.

“ _Bon Appetit_ ,” Charlotte said, serving him her rabbit stew with carrots and canned peas, garnished with oregano and thyme she found growing near her home.

His brows furrowed. “Huh?”

“Please enjoy,” she clarified, not knowing why she thought to impress him with her French. It wasn’t as if she thought the language pleasing, or that she was truly that good at it.

She thanked him again as she tidied up and served herself, reiterating he didn’t have to help her, but he did.

“I really am grateful,” she said. And at the end she added, because she thought he should know, “you’re a good man.”

“Oh, you don’t really know me.”

It stung that he would say that, oddly so, though no malice dripped from his phrasing. “I know enough,” she insisted, because others wouldn’t have stopped the first time, and even more wouldn’t have come back. Yet that must have been the knight in him.

“There’s always more to find in ourselves,” she said. “You helped me see that.”

If he agreed or not he didn’t reply, he only ate silently as she ate silently. Weeks of being alone with only her thoughts and her books to occupy her, the presence of another was foreign, though certainly not unwelcome. That was her and Cal, they could talk without words, be content to read silently by each other’s side. Arthur must have been used to silence too, the sounds of the outside his only comfort he wasn’t completely alone.

He studied her, glancing at her between bites of stew. He said she looked better when they first crossed paths again, likely because she had taken some time to rub the grim from her face, even though her hair was still lacking a coiffure, though one had more important things to worry about than hair away from the city. She looked some semblance of the woman she was but still ate sitting straight and with her other hand on her lap. He however ate with his elbows on the table, hunched over, and she had an inkling he was used to sipping directly from the bowl, gathered through the way he struggled getting the last dregs of stew from the bowl with the spoon.

Well. She had always wanted to do that as a child, pick up the bowl and sip, though her mother’s hand slapped her whenever she attempted it. She felt the sting as she lifted the bowl and finished her stew off that way. From the corner of her eye, she saw Arthur did the same. She was glad the bowl hid her smile.

He quickly wiped at his mouth. “Stew was good,” he complimented.

“Thank you,” Charlotte said, wiping at her mouth as well, topping it with wiping at her dress and staining it. “I was worried at first, I hadn’t made anything like this before. But when I was a girl I used to sneak into the kitchen and watch the cook. I must have picked up a few things.”

Cal was such an optimist, she told Arthur. It carried over to her, though she admitted there was a fine line between optimism and naivety. She and Cal, both born with a silver spoon in their mouths, imagined that they could take a wagon from Annesburg to their new home, and the canned goods would last until they could begin growing vegetables and fruit from their garden. What fools they were, to believe they could go from banquets, butlers and valets to their own self-reliance.

“Is that what it’s like in the big city?” Arthur asked. “Sounds terrible.”

“There’s so many people, so many things,” Charlotte replied. “I was crushed by it.”

The bitter truth was she was crushed by everything that happened after she left. She imagined an easy transition, something pastoral where she and Cal could garden and make homemade wine, write the next great American novel.

“I became far more pathetic than any anti-heroine I could ever pen,” she mused.

“I reckon you’re gonna be just fine.”

She smiled at his sincerity. She reckoned he was right.

She had a wonder how she would see him off as he finished. She even wondered if he would stay. Politeness would compel her to tell him he was more than welcome to the guest room. He would probably decline, though maybe she would have wished he would stay.

“Ma’am, I appreciate this, really, bu—”

She saved him the trouble. “I understand. But be welcomed to stay, if…wait…”

About ready to stand, he doubled over and pressed his hand to his shoulder, the same place he did outside when she noticed his slight sway. “Are you alright?” she asked.

Standing fully, he leaned against the wooden chair. He groaned.

“Sir, are you alright?” she asked again.

“Just a scratch,” he replied, rising. “Listen, ma’am. I appreciate this, thank you for the meal, but—”  
At his heavy groan she rushed to his side, steadying him as he steadied her earlier. “You’re hurt,” she said. “Let me see.”

“It’s really no—”

“Let me see. Please.”

At last obliging, he opened his tan colored jacket for her. Stains of dried blood caked his right shoulder, and he winced when her fingers lightly ghosted over the wound.

“Wolves,” he muttered. “About an hour and a half from here.”

“More wolves?”

He had a friend named Hamish who fancied hunting a legendary she-wolf, he said, before she could begin to worry they were around her home. They were tracking the beast, but ended up the hunted.

“You rode here with this?” she asked, concern mounting.

“I had no choice ma’am.”

“Charlotte,” she corrected, “please don’t call me ma’am, my mother was ma’am.”

Something in her simple mind deemed that was the most important thing to tell him then, but there was a small victory when he amended it and called her “Charlotte” as she asked.

“Charlotte,” he said again. “Please. It’s no trouble. Been through worse.”

It didn’t mean she could ignore it. “Did you take care of it?”

“The wound isn’t deep. I reckon it’ll heal just fine.”

“Please. Let me take care of it.”

“I can—”

“I want to.”

His eyes softened. He relented, nodding, and she brought him to his full height— a good forehead taller than her—and she ushered him into the guest bedroom, the room with a tiny bed that she and Cal hoped would be their child’s room one day. Arthur dwarfed the bed, but he made no fuss as she shuffled out and searched for a bottle of alcohol, a clean cloth, and something to bind the wound. Cal insisted on a few cases of the potent, and in her opinion, sickening concoction of moonshine with them on their new adventure, and though she protested it at the time, she was glad to have it now. From what she knew from pulp magazines, the alcohol from the moonshine could disinfect the wound. She recalled it was also something Mr. Jenkins informed her before she left. _You must be prepared Charlotte,_ he said. _If something happens to you or Cal, the doctor won’t be right down the street…_

As a doctor she failed Cal. She wouldn’t fail Arthur.

She used up all the bindings she had after she brought Cal home that evening of the attack, but she needed something for Arthur. Haste rather than spite brought her to her room to one of her skirts from her old life, a red satin frilly thing she never liked wearing, something she insisted on leaving behind before her mother told her to bring it in case there was a gathering, but Charlotte had to admit satisfaction when she ripped the hem to make a suitable binding.

Returning to Arthur, the man sitting on what would have been her and Cal’s child’s bed, she realized there was another dilemma. She would have to ask him to take off his jacket and his shirt.

“Sir…I—”

“Arthur.”

She blinked, and he faintly grinned. “Now Charlotte, it’s only fair. Sir was my father anyway.”

“Oh. Right. Arthur.” It was the first time she said the name aloud, though he had been a familiar thread in her thoughts lately. She could say it more often, she thought, it was a name that lent itself to be repeated.

She came over to the bedside table, and set the moonshine, cloth, and torn satin down. Upon his inquiry she informed him it was the products of a dress she wore to a cousin’s wedding she particularly despised.

“The cousin or the dress?”

“Both,” Charlotte clarified. “I wouldn’t even have brought it, but my mother insisted.”

“Did your mother think there’d be a party up here to attend?”

“My mother has a limited view on things, and believes what she wants to. That is one thing I hope to never have.”

“Not at all.”

He peered at her. He brought such a presence to her home, a distinctly male one, but different from Cal’s, who bore some of the distinguished gentleman his family wanted to be. He was neither pure frontiersman nor a distinguished gentleman like Cal, but something in between that forged a masculinity of humbleness and rawness, elicited through the way he sat and respected her.

It was still daring of him to assume. “You don’t know me,” she said.

“I know enough.”

Conceding, she nodded. In his life—in their lives—knowing enough was sometimes enough. It had to be.

She was unaware of the rising heat to her cheeks at first, but she became all the more aware when she informed him he was going to have to take his jacket and shirt off.

“Now, I was married,” she said. “These sorts of things aren’t new to me, so if you would kindly take off your jacket and shirt to make this easier…”

She didn’t stare, though she saw from the corner of her eye that he began by taking off his jacket. She took it from him and set it on the table nearby as he began to unbutton his shirt as well. She suspected these sorts of things weren’t knew to him as well, as she also suspected he wasn’t the one who did the removing. Had her mother and father known her vulgar thoughts they would have slapped her. But in the city there’s time to worry about vulgarity, she and Arthur had no time for frivolous societal norms and expectations. They had to make their own society.

He handed her his blue collared shirt, torn were the wolf bit, and she set it aside along with the jacket. In her life she had only seen one other man’s nakedness, though Cal was thinner and taller where Arthur was stockier. His skin was pale where the sun did not reach, coarse hair the same color of his hair on his chest and lower, disappearing into his breeches. He was a man that ate when he could and learned how to carry that weight the most effectively. He was lean, but well-toned and littered with a few scars. Charlotte told herself she only gave a cursory glance there at his chest or where the line of hair disappeared below his breeches, or at his strong arms and shoulders where she saw an old wound long since healed, perhaps by another woman. She also saw he wore no ring. She still wore hers.

She cleaned off the dried blood with the dampened clean cloth. He apologized for the sight, but she had seen far worse. “This may sting a bit,” she said before dabbing at the bite-marked wound against his shoulder. He merely grimaced but otherwise showed no sign he was bothered.

“The dog jumped me,” he said. “Would have been worse had Hamish not been there.”

She continued to clean the wound. “Hamish is your friend?”

“I guess you could say that. He’s an army veteran. Found his horse for him once, took me fishing once, then took me hunting this last time.”

“You fish?” she asked. “There’s a river nearby, though Cal didn’t have a rod. I told him it would be a good idea for us to get one and learn.”

“It is a good idea,” Arthur agreed. “I’m no fisherman, but I do know a few things.”

He seemed like he would be good at anything. “I don’t believe it,” she stated with a smirk.

“Oh, it’s true,” he drawled. “I was at the lake for hours once before finally giving up. But we needed food for the night, so I went to the market and bought three largemouth basses. Dutch and Hosea—couple of people I run with,” he clarified, “they were so impressed, they thought I caught all the fish myself. So I lied to them.”

They caught him, he said. The next day, the three passing through town, the butcher saw Arthur asked if he enjoyed the fish. Charlotte laughed, and Arthur laughed. It was the first time she had laughed since Cal died—since they arrived, and Charlotte remembered how wonderful it was, to share a laugh with someone, how much you could bond with someone, through laughing with them.

“So,” she began as she bound the wound as tightly as she could, laughing with him thinking she should ask more about him. “You run with people.”

“Sure,” he replied.

“Do you have a home?”

“Wherever I am is home I suppose.”

She found it a lovely attitude, she said as much. She didn’t prod about the people he ran with, the things he did with them. He figured her for a smart woman anyway, he didn’t need to say anything about it. She would have listened though, if he decided to tell her. Besides, she already decided, already knew that he was a good man.

The shirt was dirty and stained with blood. Charlotte brought him one of Cal’s.

“I can’t take this from you,” he said.

“I insist,” she replied. “And I also want to give you this.”

It was one hundred dollars. She offered it to him as he stood, and though he studied it, he did not take it.

“I can’t take your money Charlotte,” he said simply.

“But I want you too. I have all I would ever need in the city, and I came here because I didn’t want this or any of it. And I know what you must be thinking…poor little rich girl, but—”

“I wasn’t thinking that at all. I was thinking you are very brave.”

She took his hand. She placed the money in his large and broad palm, rough and calloused yet not unpleasant.

“Please take it,” she said.

For the second time he refused, and she relented, sticking the bills in the little box near the bed. Though he did take Cal’s shirt—his olive green collared every day shirt that he only wore around the house in Chicago, and one she wore in jest a few times, laying on their marriage bed and waiting for him to return from the bank. As Arthur put it on she remembered those times, the warm welcome of Cal’s kiss, and delicate hands on her skin. She imagined a different sort of touch from Arthur as she escorted him out, and he grabbed his hat from the table, promised him she was going to go hunting the next day.

“There are more than animals out there,” he said. “Charlotte. If someone comes here…”

Gravely, she nodded. She knew.

“Don’t hesitate.”

“I won’t hesitate,” she promised.

“Good.”

She walked him over to his horse, who he had hitched outside the wall. “Thank you,” she said. “So much. Truly. I feel like a new woman now.”

“It was no problem,” he said, climbing on top of his horse, Charlotte idly petting the animal’s salt and pepper coat. “Thank you, for everything.”

They looked at each other longer than what was proper, before his horse finally carried him away. Before he was away from the ground, she asked him to wait.

“Charlotte?” he asked.

She liked the way he said her name. Cal said it with a soft lilt, Arthur was harder on the syllables, making her feel like a real frontier and plainswoman.

She put her hands on her hips. “You missed earlier on purpose.”

He tipped his hat. “Caught me.”

“Be careful Arthur,” she said. “Be well.”

“Always.”

He didn’t look back as he left for good, but he didn’t have to for her to remember his blue-green eyes, remember the way they crinkled when he laughed, or had light in them when he looked at her. She wished she would have embraced him. It wouldn’t have been proper for a woman of the city, but as she said, there was no time for formalities, not anymore. And, she wasn’t a city woman anymore. Yet to meet again, just to say goodbye was a great and sweet sorrow. It deserved more. Arthur, the only one who had ever called her brave before, deserved more.

She went to bed that night with the wish for more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you enjoyed! I always welcome comments :) Truly they give every writer vigor.


	3. Chapter 3

To no one in particular, except the morning sky, the river, and perhaps Cal, who perhaps heard in the heavens, Charlotte uttered her first words in a week and a half, even to herself, since Arthur last left.

“Look at me,” she said. “I am alive.”

She sighed, giddy and new as she stretched her arms out wide and closed her eyes, breathing in the pine mingled with the smell of the water’s light spray. The fresh morning air elicited her to pull down her hair and pull up her skirts, go to the water’s edge and stand barefoot in the river. How long had it been since she saw herself in the water, falling in and floating down, hair strewn about and skirts and petticoats around like a great white lily, like Ophelia in _Hamlet_? How much had happened since Ophelia became neither a Hamlet or a Macbeth, or someone else who had caused their own downfall, but someone entirely new, who learned and survived, and lived?

“Look at me Cal,” Charlotte said, knowing he did hear, somewhere far. “I’m going to survive.”

She all but danced back to the house, the joy of bare feet against the blades of grass as divine as she remembered it as a girl. Her family had a townhome in Chicago. The backyard was small, but it had flowerbeds, with some roses and wildflowers growing. The cook, Lavinia, (though Charlotte called her “Livvy,”) always said fairies lived among the roses and the wildflowers. She showed her pictures in books of tiny, barefoot fairies with butterfly wings on their back. Charlotte, in seeing those pictures, and wanting to be like them, took off her shoes and danced in the grass before her mother saw and scolded her. It was a beautiful moment while it lasted. Even then, she had a thought that that was how life was supposed to be, carefree and not in shoes that pinched her toes, and dresses that prevented one from really dancing.  
But alone in the wilds, no one could stop her from dancing barefoot in the grass anymore.

“Charlotte Balfour?”

She had been alone, though not necessarily lonely, yet in hearing that gravely yet mellifluous voice she hadn’t heard in months, she remembered how much she liked his company and presence. Of course, her noble and dashing knight Arthur with his voice like leather and honey would appear again when she had gotten used to being alone, and being the version of her truest self in the process. But as she waved and welcomed him, she had the thought that being her truest self didn’t have to stop when he was near.

“Mrs. Balfour,” Arthur greeted, tipping his hat. “You look…”

“Ridiculous, I know,” she said with a laugh. She wore a red calico dress, pattern washed out and away with no petticoat and no shoes, an utterly scandalous choice of clothes. She wore her hair in a long braid over her shoulder, and though she was tempted to take the pair of scissors and cut the braid into something shorter and simpler, she decided to keep her hair the way it was. It would have been too painful to rid herself of a sweet reminder of before, a reminder of how Cal used to run his fingers through her cascading raven colored hair as she sat at her vanity and brushed after the day’s end. Though something was there that wasn’t before, a single thread of silver at the top, all the more striking against her dark hair. A line of her gained wisdom, her survival.

“Not ridiculous at all Mrs. Balfour,” Arthur replied, grinning, though he was too polite for his own good. She didn’t feel like Ophelia anymore, but she realized she certainly looked the part, with her shoes in her hand and not on, unpinned hair, and dancing to a made-up song. Next she would have sung, “tomorrow is St. Valentine’s day,” like the actress sung on stage when she saw that production of _Hamlet_ against her mother and father’s wishes.

“Why, but Arthur,” Charlotte said, running her hands through her plait, before realizing she didn’t know his surname. “Arthur…?”

“Morgan. Arthur Morgan.”

“Arthur Morgan,” Charlotte announced, finding it a fine name for a fine man. “You don’t have to lie.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you Charlotte,” he said. How she believed him.

“It’s good to see you again,” she said after some comfortable silence, Charlotte basking in her truest self. “Though I’m afraid I probably do seem a little ridiculous.”

“You’re happy.”

“I am,” she said, the announcement cementing it and making it truer. “I wasn’t made for this sort of life, but I’ve made it my sort of life.” She gestured to her home. Her kingdom, her domain. Hers. “I am happy,” she said, and it gave it it’s finality.

“You deserve to be happy Charlotte. After what happened, what you’ve been through, it’s the least you deserve.”

“Would you come in?”

“Ah, I can’t take advantage of your hospitality again,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “You’ve done more than enough. I only wanted to return the shirt you lent me.”

“It wasn’t necessary Arthur,” she assured. Giving him that was the least she could do, especially after he turned down the money.

“Oh, but I wanted to. Washed it too, afraid I may have gotten mud on it at one point, but the stain is gone, and it smells nice again. Here.”

She took the folded shirt from him, noting he did indeed wash it as he said—it smelled of lye, yet faintly, she detected a new scent, distinctly not Cal’s, but masculine none the less. It must have been his smell that clung to it, she got the feeling that his smell of sunshine, grass, sweat, earth, and that note that was distinctly Arthur Morgan clung to most places he had a prominent presence.

“It was a little tight anyway,” he said. “Might have gained some weight.”

“I can’t tell,” Charlotte replied, glancing at his midsection, and likely longer than she needed to before she changed the subject, insisting that since he rode all the way to her home, she had to invite him in.

“It’s not necessary ma’am, you’ve—”

“Ah, my mother was ma’am, remember,”

“Charlotte,” he amended, nodding. “You’ve done so much already.”

“As have you,” she said, perplexed at his self-deprecation. “Now, I may fancy myself a frontierswoman now, but I didn’t forget what my mother taught me. You helped me, and what’s mine is yours. Please, do come in.”

“Charlotte—”

She put her hand on her hip. “You’re also someone who has been kind to me. More people can learn from you. I can’t let you leave here without at least a cup of coffee.”

At last he relented, the victory sweet. For breakfast that morning she made coffee for herself, planning on cooking a new stew with venison meat during the afternoon to eat for dinner. She had taken to eating only supper, a meal that usually consisted of stew, or cooked game meat with a side of fresh vegetables. The seedlings she and Cal brought were finally growing, right along with the fresh flowers that adorned the bed outside her cabin. Finally, the fairies had a place to be. Arthur made note of them before he entered the cabin, once again taking off his hat as he entered, and setting it on the table as he did the last time. Charlotte didn’t even bother putting back on her shoes, tossing them to the side of the house before taking out two cups and pouring a cup for herself and for him. They chatted about the weather and about his journeys, no wolves this time or anything of that sort, but he had heard of a certain “Murfree brood” that frequented near Annesburg.

“You haven’t seen anyone ‘round here have you?” Arthur asked. “No one’s come over, asked for any money or anything like that have they?”

“No,” Charlotte replied. “It’s been quiet and peaceful. Haven’t seen anyone except you.”

He nodded, and she asked if she should be worried about that sort of thing. Certainly she knew anything could happen out in the wilderness at any given time, but that was true for the city as well, or anywhere. Nature was dangerous, perhaps people more so.

“Don’t be worried,” he advised, “but be ready.”

“Always.”

He pointed to the buck pelt that adorned the floor near the fire. “That wasn’t there before,” he said. “Nice one too.”

“I’ve been hunting,” she bragged, recalling how yesterday Cal’s rifle didn’t feel so heavy anymore. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

He wasn’t used to so much praise, so many words of thanks, she could tell by his unease. It was a shame. He should have been appreciated often, and by someone who truly did appreciate him. Maybe she was the proper person.

“Well,” she said, sipping her coffee as he gulped his, “that’s new, I see.”

She gestured to the gold star on his paisley blue colored vest. “Oh no,” he said, touching it and admiring it. “I’ve had it for a while now. Guess you could say I’ve been deputized by the Grays in Rhodes.”

“Rhodes?” She heard of the smaller town near the bigger and more developed Saint Denis, the place littered with old confederates and backwards attitudes. Or at least, that was what Cal said on their way up to Annesburg. They didn’t go near the place during their travels, but the reputation through power of word traveled.

“Have you heard of it? It’s near St. Denis.”

“It’s in Lemoyne,” she replied. “You traveled all the way from Lemoyne to here?”

“Oh, it’s not that far. A day’s journey alone, at most. Pepper—my horse—she’s fast.”

“But you came all the way out here alone?”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind being alone, sometimes.”

“Neither do I apparently,” Charlotte said, though she knew that to be true for a long time. Her brother was five years younger, she learned to entertain herself as a child when her mother entertained at garden parties and her father was away at work. Books were her friends, the fairies who lived in the flower beds her friends too, though they didn’t speak to her as much as she would have liked. Sometimes they didn’t speak to her at all. Livvy did, though Livvy of course was busy most of the time. She passed away before Charlotte married. She missed her.

She had been roughly counting the days since she and Cal had begun their new life. A month and a week in when she brought him home and laid him on their bed, trying to bring him back to life. A week after, her knight Arthur appeared, and then he came back another week after that. A week and a half passed alone after. She liked to be alone, being the woman she couldn’t always be, even with Cal, who believed in fairies and danced under the moon to a song only she heard.

Glimpsing at Arthur, who leaned back in the chair, ran hand through his hair that was styled with no pomade, making it stick up a little and making her have to hold back a chuckle, she remembered she didn’t always like to be alone. She remembered and simultaneously, she discovered him. She had been discovering since she met him, the second meeting allowing her the knowledge that he was so unique and nuanced from anyone else she had ever known, that would allow her ability to paint him to a canvas. More time with him in his presence, a presence that like his looks, were different from anyone else she had ever known, allowed her an awareness of his inherent masculinity underlined with something softer. He studied her, aware she was a woman, but not focused on her femininity and how it contrasted with his masculinity. He studied her as a person who he shared the earth with, as a person who helped him.

She didn’t mind being alone. She liked being alone. Yet even without words, his presence locked a piece of her that she didn’t even know that was unlocked.

“I’m sorry.”

The apology, though sincere, perplexed her. “For what?”

“You came here, expecting something you didn’t get. I know what that’s like.”

“We were naïve,” Charlotte replied. “We had very idyllic images of our new life, one that didn’t involve skinning any animals, or nearly starving because we didn’t know how to hunt, or anything of that sort. But I did get my ideal, in a way.” She wouldn’t have been able to dance under the moon like perhaps a fairy or moon goddess would have if she hadn’t.

“This is what you dreamed about?”

She nodded. “I’m free. I’m alone most of the time,” all the time rather, when he wasn’t there, “but I’m free. And there’s no one to tie me down, or tell me I’m odd, or—"

“Charlotte. Was your husband—?”

She understood how it could have come across. She shook her head quickly, alleviating his worry. “No,” she assured, ashamed her words would even suggest that. “Cal would never have hurt me, or wanted to tie me down. No, no, of course not. No. What I meant was, Cal may have been an optimist, but he did have a firm grip on reality when I never really did. I believed in fairies and knights of the round table. He did too for a time, before he changed. That’s why he wanted to come here, he wanted something real.”

“I’d never been one for the city,” Arthur admitted, a touch bashful. “But what do you mean? That bad huh?”

“Yes,” she replied. “That bad. I don’t think the things that people want in the city, like money, power… that sort of thing, are real,” she explained. “Status. It doesn’t exist. Someone far too bored and self-important made it up. I’d rather be devoured by wolves than have to be concerned with status again.”

It was a dramatic statement, but he didn’t reply, only listened, leaning in. “Cal was the same,” Charlotte continued. “He was such an odd man. He loved stories like I did, hated his job at the bank, thought moving here would give us something real. Ironic he stopped believing in stories, but he thought coming here would give us something real. He thought it a fine place to raise a child. I did too.” She paused, sipping her coffee. “I never got pregnant, you see,” she continued, Arthur’s eyes soft. “We always hoped for a family, and in moving here, maybe it would finally happen. I suppose my body wasn’t meant to carry.”

One of the things that kept her going after Cal’s passing was the hope of a life growing inside her. She bled not long after she buried Cal, before Arthur first came. She had such hopes.

“I’m sorry.”

His apology that didn’t need to be uttered reminded her she built new hopes for a new life, ones that were dormant until he arrived by Cal’s grave and reminded her. “Arthur,” she said. King Arthur, she called him in her mind, though he would blush if she dared call him that to his face.

“Charlotte.”

She grinned. The name wasn’t as romantic as Guinevere, but she liked the way he said it. She noted the way he said it before, yes, and how it made her feel like a real frontierswoman, but since becoming a real frontierswoman, who shot her own food, learned to skin an animal and made the wilderness her palace, she realized she liked the way he said it because she loved his voice and how it wasn’t soft like silk and syrupy like honey, but rough like leather.

“Arthur,” she said, toying with her plait, “you couldn’t have just returned to bring back my husband’s shirt.”

The bold and rash statement that perhaps she should never have said, followed with his wavering, straightening, almost pulling and drifting himself from her.

He came with no expectations, he stated as such. She stated she meant nothing herself, though that was partially not the truth.

She sighed, cheeks no doubt flaming. “I see,” she muttered. “You wanted to see I was alright.”

“I did.”

“I am alright,” she said. “I’m alive.”

“And you’re going to be just fine.”

“But…” And perhaps her next phrase was far bolder than her previous, “it’s good to have a friend.”

“It is,” he said, and he smiled at her, and it was one of the sweetest moments she had with another soul.

She offered a toast for friends. Their cups clinked together. “To living,” he toasted.

She toasted back to living before she set the cup down, proclaiming they should celebrate by doing and not merely saying. How? He asked. He didn’t really know what living was, and he wasn’t insincere. Odd, for she thought she was the one that hadn’t lived at first, while he had. Then again, maybe everyone always thought one thing was true and something else wasn’t.

Charlotte though, she had a few ideas about what living was. “It’s being happy,” she announced.

“Ah. Reckon you’re right.”

She leaned her hand upon her cheek. “Well then, what makes you happy?”

When he didn’t answer, she searched for the obvious—what made many men happy. “Women?” she suggested, though she was certain the type of women that made the men of the city happy, women that painted their faces, wore hoops, petticoats, and shoes that weren’t sensible at all, weren’t women he had in mind.

“Sure…” he admitted, turning the word into a long drawn out phrase, (his accent turning it into ‘shouh’ as well.) rather than a simple answer. He was sheepish, embarrassed even. He cleared his throat. “But we…uh…parted ways.”

“Oh,” Charlotte drawled, not wanting to subject him to going on, discussing a wound that still ached. “I see.”

He sighed. “Her name is Mary,” he added, almost flippant. “but—she’s gone now, left me, not really part of things.”

Charlotte didn’t know anything about Mary, other than that she had a great loss if she let go of Arthur, and that she and he must have once burned for one another, and loved hard the way Charlotte once loved Cal and he her. Charlotte didn’t know Mary, but she knew Arthur, and that might have made her skewed to look at Arthur more favorably than she would have looked at Mary. Yet she pieced the woman together, as well as she could with the little clues given in Arthur’s demeanor. She was no matchmaker, no great sage of love, but she had an inkling that Mary viewed Arthur not as a man, but as someone she could change and settle down with. Be proud she had changed. And Arthur was not the settling down type. He was a wanderer. He also wasn’t one for change, for no woman or no man. She was a wanderer too, though she had learned not to wander from place to place, but through novels and through her mind. She never changed for anyone. She was lucky enough to find a man who breathed the same as she.

She found one again.

“Please come back,” she found herself saying during the evening, and she led him to his horse. “I like being alone, truly, but—”

“I know. I need a friend too.”

Two weeks, he promised. He would try to come back in two weeks. Still laughing about the story he told her, about Mary’s brother Jamie joining the Chelonians and Arthur’s daring rescue, Charlotte warned him about accidentally getting caught in their ways.

He laughed. “No. I like turtles as much as anyone, but the Chelonians ain’t for me.”

She was a bold, rash woman, and perhaps living alone had given her some new ideas and ways of looking at the world. Then again, that was precisely why she and Cal abandoned the city. They wanted new ideas, new experiences. It was still a bold of her to have that idea, that Charlotte Clementina Vale Balfour may have been a woman who was exactly for Arthur Morgan. Not as a lover necessarily, though she thought perhaps in a different life they could have been quite the pair.

She would not do that to Cal. She still burned for her first love, her only love. Though she burned for Arthur, who had become her knight, though he wore not silver armor, but a blue vest, jeans, boots, and a gambler’s hat. She burned for his loneliness, and his troubles that he had begun to share with her, and she burned for more time with him that would allow her to learn more.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is going to be longer than what I originally said, lol.

_I promised Charlotte Balfour I would visit her in two weeks. It’s been four. Three since Colm O’Driscoll’s boys got ahold of me. Two since Miss Grimshaw let me get up out of bed and at least walk around. I hope she’s not lonely. I hope she doesn’t think something happened to me. I can’t imagine everything she’s been through. I don’t want her worrying over me. Then again, maybe I’m too proud to think I’m someone she would worry over._

He drew a picture of her while Miss Grimshaw kept him pinned to his cot. He went back to it that morning sitting by the lake, watching the sun rise. He went back to that drawing nearly every morning and evening. He couldn’t depict the silver in her hair with just his pencil, and he also couldn’t depict her dancing eyes either, but with what skills he had, he drew Charlotte Balfour with her cheek resting on her hand, looking at him like he was neither a fool or a brute. The truth was he was both a fool and a brute, and the bigger truth was he didn’t deserve kindness from a good woman who thought more than a damn about him and looked at him like he was more than what he was. She took up one page of his journal, yet his thoughts of her ran deeper than the one drawing and the one page.

 _Imagine if I didn’t see her at the grave,_ he wrote. _I_ _would have taken everything she owned instead of her handing me one hundred dollars in thanks. It wouldn’t have been enough, but now I have retribution for ever thinking about robbing her blind. She’s alone and I can’t tell her that I’m sorry. Probably turn me away if I told her the truth. Probably what I deserve._

I don’t want her alone. Not because she wouldn’t be able to survive, but because I don’t want her alone.

“You better now Uncle Arthur?”

Arthur set his journal aside. Jack was barefoot by the water’s edge. Reminded him of Charlotte standing barefoot in the grass by her cabin last time he saw her. She looked so much older when he first met her, old with grief. Time alone made her younger. Maybe it was the same for him. Alone and with only himself there was no one to disappoint.

“Sure, a lot better now, thank you Jack,” Arthur replied. “Finally okay to leave camp too. Thank you for the book you lent me while I was sick.”

“Micah said some mean things,” Jack said, splashing some water at his feet. “Said you were okay, but Tilly, Mary Beth, and Miss Grimshaw were keeping you from working.”

Arthur overhead when he was in bed, everyone thinking that because he was bedridden he had gone dumb. But Micah Bell said mean things about everyone. At least he could take it.

“I’m alright now Jack,” he said. “Going to leave today too.”

“Where?”

“Well,” Arthur began, thinking maybe Jack’s childhood innocence could make the situation clearer, “there’s someone I need to see.”

“Who?”

“A friend. Need to check on her, make sure she’s doing okay.”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“Lots of reasons,” Arthur replied, rising. “It’s why I have to make sure. See you later Jack.”

“See you later Uncle Arthur.”

He trimmed his beard and found a hair pomade Tilly or Mary Beth must have left by his bed, thinking he would use it, next to the picture book Jack lent him while he was still laying in bed cursing everything. It could have been Hosea or Dutch too who left the pomade, as both talked about keeping up appearances in settlements. Either way, he hardly wore it, his hair looked fine enough covered by a hat. In fact, he almost didn’t like the way he looked with the pomade. It reminded him too much of Mary’s father and those type of people.

But he was going to see Charlotte. She was used to those sorts of people. She didn’t like them, sure, but he always wondered if she didn’t like the way he smelled, or the way he dressed, if he was too backward for her taste. On impulse and with those thoughts, he warmed the grease in his hands and slicked back his hair.

“You’re not going to see Mary Linton are you?”

Arthur caught Tilly’s yellow skirts from the corner of his eye. “No,” he replied. “Why would you think that?”

“You use pomade last time you saw her. Remember? You were sad for days.”

He remembered. “No,” he said. “Not today.”

“Oh, ‘not today?’ Well I’m with Mary Beth. You’re too good for her.”

Most people would have claimed it was the other way around, Arthur pointed out. A lady of high society with an outlaw was a good concept for one of those novels Tilly and Mary Beth liked to read, and Arthur and Mary would have been the loving couple who vowed to never part. In real life it was nothing but two fools doing foolish things and having foolish ideas about the way of the world.

“Am I?” Arthur asked. “I don’t think so.”

“She only wrote to you because she wanted something from you,” Tilly pointed out, a hand on her hip, before retracting suddenly. “Arthur, I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have said anything,” she amended, looking away.

He thought the truth was most people always wanted something off of other people, but he told Tilly it was alright, she didn’t cross any lines, and after sitting with him for so long, reading to him to pass the time, she had every right to say what she pleased to him. He also told her the truth of the matter, that he was going up near Annesburg to see a friend he promised to see a while ago before everything went to hell.

“That woman in your journal? The one with the braid?”

He nodded, laughing at himself and how he wasn’t as mysterious as he thought. “Charlotte,” he said. “Charlotte Balfour, from Chicago. Recently widowed.”

Tilly looked downward, shaking her head. “I can’t imagine that.”

“She’s a survivor,” Arthur said. “Didn’t know how to hunt or nothing at first, but she learned. I taught her.”

“You taught her?” She stood tall, looking proudly at him. “You’re a good man Arthur.”

“Not so much,” he said with a sigh. “You know why I was up there? I got a tip from some woman the law was going to lock up.”

It was up near Valentine, and he was riding when a carriage drove by. “I’m innocent, save me!” the woman demanded from behind the bars, and Arthur got her out, because of course he got her out, but at the moment he didn’t think about what she had done or what she could possibly do. She was only a woman that asked for his help.

Well, he got her out, and she gave him a tip about a rich couple from Chicago or New York or some such place that had just moved up to a cabin near Annesburg. He didn’t know them to be Charlotte and Cal Balfour. They were any two people who had money when he didn’t. Then Cal Balfour became a man who had tragically died and Charlotte the woman who buried him. Charlotte had become his friend.

“Don’t mean to sound like one of those books you let us read to you,” Tilly said, far wiser than he, “but I think you got something better than money.”

He grinned. “Suppose you’re right.”

“Go on and go Arthur. See you later.”

He thanked her for everything, and she promised it was no trouble.

He went on ahead and brushed Peppermint, giving her an apple before going to Buell and doing the same. That horse didn’t like the others, the stubborn thing was at the farthest corner away from everyone else. It never ceased to interest him how some horses were exactly like humans.

“Boy,” Arthur said, patting his mane, attempting to bond. “You’re a good boy. I know you miss him. I do too.”

His ears twitched and his eyes were solemn. Still in mourning his human. Arthur realized he liked Buell’s human more than he thought too. Tragedy, for a man to survive all that he survived and lose his leg in the process for his end to be a wild boar.

Before he passed, he asked Arthur to take his horse. Buell didn’t like him as much, it wasn’t as easy as it was with Peppermint to brush or feed. Dutch asked why he couldn’t just sell him, but he couldn’t do that.

He did however, have an idea.

“Hey boy,” Arthur said, “want to meet someone really nice?”

 

* * *

 

 

He rode Buell to Charlotte’s house, Peppermint at his side. It took a little longer than he hoped, but he had to make camp near Van Horn and sleep overnight. At that point, the pomade he put in his hair to impress Charlotte was no longer doing what it was supposed to be doing. Served him right for trying to impress.

It was early morning when he made it there, but the door was locked and she was nowhere in sight. He waited, sitting at her front steps. He waited for nearly an hour, and when he thought maybe he should look for her, there she was.

She had shoes on this time, but her hair was in that same side plait she wore last time, with that same dress. Strapped to her back was her rifle. She carried three rabbit carcasses. She must not have seen the horses, though he did put them off to the side, and she didn’t glide as she did last he saw her, but she walked solemnly, the way a woman who survived did, and not one that lived.

He rose. “Charlotte, I—”

“Arthur?”

She came near him, looked deep into his eyes. She blinked and looked but he wasn’t sure if she believed he was there.

“It’s been a long time,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry, I—”

“Come in.”

She set the carcasses down, put her rifle aside as Arthur came in. She washed her hands and her face, didn’t look at him as she did so. Since he had been in her presence he saw mostly her back. “Charlotte,” he said, knowing he had to explain himself. “I would have come sooner, but—”

“I thought something happened,” she stated, still not looking.

“Something did happen, but—”

But her arms wrapped around him and he didn’t get to explain.

Charlotte Balfour embraced with her whole being, so much so that she swayed them a little back and forth, and he felt her being collide with his. He wrapped his arms around her frame and she made a fist in his shirt. He felt her anger, frustration, her relief.

“This isn’t proper,” Charlotte muttered, her voice muffled. “I’m sorry.”

“I missed you too.”

It wasn’t proper, but she wasn’t letting go. She wasn’t letting go and neither was he. He liked where he was.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter whooped me a little, but here it is :)

Charlotte knew why Arthur brought the horse he called Buell to her. He felt guilty for not arriving when he promised, and gift horse was an offering of repentance. Yet there was something that ran deeper than that, the unwavering truth that she was bold enough to assume, even bolder to know. He simply didn’t want her to be alone.

She wasn’t lonely before. Perhaps after Cal died yes, but he was in the sky maybe, and she had the moon and stars. So perhaps, she wasn’t truly alone. But if it wasn’t true, she had herself, and she would always have herself.

She promised Arthur as much, that she wasn’t really lonely, her hands gripping his shoulders even though that too was improper behavior. The matter was, she explained, that the last time he was there to bring back Cal’s shirt, he promised a return. She was fine when he wasn’t there, certainly not lonely. She was only lonely the promise wasn’t fulfilled in the time he said it would be.

He promised it wouldn’t happen again. A thousand times he promised. She believed it from the first.

“Something happened, Charlotte,” he said. As he spoke he pressed his palms into her back, playing a game of what was proper and what wasn’t. She was the first that entered the match, throwing herself to him as she did, the thing she wanted to do since she first saw him finally simmering and she could take it no longer. Arthur however held her chastely enough to not cross any borders, firm enough to remind her he wasn’t an apparition or trick her mind played. It was a possibility she was more than aware of— the lonely woman finally going insane and conjuring the apparition of a knight coming to rescue her. But Arthur was too real and earthy to be a trick of the mind. His shirt was rough in her hands and his smell of sweat and leather and sun, his voice of honey and leather too idiosyncratic for her to hear as a disembodied remembrance.

“What something?” she asked, peering at him.

His gaze wavered, his touch and feel against her back not as strong or as present. She didn’t like that, she wanted him to hold tighter. So she told him no matter, he was there now, the now was what mattered.

“I’ll make coffee,” she said. “And you must stay for dinner.”

“I would like that. But Charlotte?”

She turned from the kitchen. “Arthur?”

“There’s someone I want you to meet first.”

The “someone” was Buell the horse, a stubborn palomino who gave Charlotte a strange, far off and vacant look. “I can teach you how to ride,” Arthur said, patting Buell’s mane. “But…oh.”

She could already see. She could already smell, and appropriately, Arthur muttered “shit,” under his breath as Charlotte resisted the urge to cover her nose.

“It happens sometimes,” Arthur said, the two of them trying not to look as Buell continued to relieve himself. If she didn’t know any better, she would have sworn he wanted to smack Buell for his indolence.

“I would imagine,” Charlotte replied.

“Just sometimes. Usually just gotta move them away.”

That wasn’t the real matter however, Arthur said as he took the horses away to the other side of the entryway, though he blushed before continuing. Though Buell had a saddle on already, it wasn’t suited for a lady.

“Not suited for a lady?” Charlotte demanded, crossing her arms. “Why Arthur Morgan…”

His eyes widened in fear. “Oh Charlotte. What I meant is…”

“I know what you meant,” she said with a smile. “I can tease too you know.”

He didn’t reply, only smiled back as she inspected the saddle, fit for a real cowboy. She and Cal’s brief detour at the Van Horn’s stable was a brief one for a multitude of reasons. The smell was awful for one, sweat with the far too sweet hay that couldn’t mask the stench of manure. Second, when Charlotte decided to get on the horse, the stable boy pulling out the only side-saddle, she got on and could not believe how high it was off the ground. Too high, and she preferred her feet planted right on the ground.

“I don’t know if you’ll be able to get on.” Arthur said, as politely as he could, and without eyeing her calico dress. “Ride along yes, not take the reins. It calls for a lot of…”

“You can say it you know,” she said when he didn’t. “Legs.”

She could hear it all the way from Chicago, her mother screaming. One should not say “legs” in public, nor refer to the thighs, or calves, or ankles either. Once when Charlotte picked up her skirt even as a teenager, her mother slapped her hand for daring to show such skin. Charlotte never understood why, legs were not particularly the most sensual of parts. Not until she realized that they could be, laying with Cal after being together, legs entangled.

Arthur compromised. “You need to use your lower limbs,” he said. “not the easiest to do in a skirt though.”

She lifted her skirt up slightly, daring to show her ankle. Another scream from her mother in Chicago. “It’s not so much the skirt,” she said. “It’s the hoop and the petticoats.”

He never understood those, he said as a brief aside. Charlotte explained what her mother once explained to her, that the hoop and petticoats that covered the wire symbolized a woman’s space.

“One does not tread into her domain,” Charlotte continued, “and the space of hoop represents that. It is her bubble and her own, fit only for her husband. Of course here…well…”

“Charlotte.” He was about to reach out but he stopped himself. She wished to tell him he didn’t have to stop himself.

“I would have asked you to stop if I really thought it was improper,” she said softly. “Or I would have stopped it myself. Or better yet I wouldn’t even have begun this talk.”

But perhaps she really was going insane. Her mother told her once that that could happen to unmarried women. They naturally went insane. There was no worse fate than to be a spinster, she warned when Charlotte was young. The one thing she never warned about was being a widow, though if her mother held any prophecies she would most certainly had warned of her impending madness akin to Ophelia.

Maybe that would have stopped her. Likely not.

“Arthur,” Charlotte began, because she needed to know, “you didn’t think I went to far, did I? Did I assume that—”

“No.”

She broke the distance between them. “Are you sure?”

He nodded, glancing at her from underneath his hat. “Women don’t usually—do that sort of thing with me,” he revealed, a clue to his bashfulness. “Embracing. Flinging arms around me like a romance. Not anymore. Or ever really.”

“Mary never flung herself into your arms?”

“Maybe once or twice,” he replied, the slight wavering of his form giving her the indication he was surprised she remembered such a detail about his life and his past. “But she never acted like one of those heroines in those novels.”

She mentioned he said that as if he read one himself. “I did,” he replied with no shame or embarrassment, before amending that Tilly and Mary Beth were the ones that read to him while he was sick.

“Tilly and Mary Beth,” Charlotte muttered, finding it in her to stroke Buell’s mane. He didn’t flinch, and she took that as a good sign. “Who are they?” she asked. “Are they part of your gang? I didn’t realize women were allowed in gangs.”

He turned very pale. “Charlotte…”

“It’s no matter. I understood after you left that last time.”

“How?”

She told him about the stage coach and letter that arrived from her brother Alexander, about an outlaw gang that made themselves known in Valentine as he passed through the town, and it was near enough to Annesburg where he worried. “My brother is in banking too,” Charlotte said. “He followed my father, and even though he’s five years younger than me, he thinks he has the right to tell me what to do. But no matter. He does try to look out for me. That’s why I haven’t told him about Cal yet.”

She wrote the necessary letters to Cal’s mother already. His father had passed on years before, but his mother moved back to New York after, where she originated. It was the hardest letter she ever had to write, and the driver waited patiently as Charlotte penned it, wiping away tears as they fell, making sure they did not blot the words. Yet she couldn’t tell Alexander, and he was still under the impression Cal was alive and well. That didn’t stop him from wanting her to come home. She suspected her mother in law would insist the same thing, try to get her to go to New York.

Charlotte would refuse both. She liked where she was. And if she moved, the chances of seeing Arthur again…

Well. She was there. And he was there, and even though his lack of true home, his sidestepping during their first meeting of what he did, and Alexander’s letter all indicated he was an outlaw and part of a gang. Perhaps it should have bothered her, but people tended to judge others for how they imparted themselves to the individual. In Charlotte’s mind, Arthur was a chivalrous knight. He was her friend.

“I don’t care Arthur,” she said. “I know you’re a good man.”

He did things that contradicted that, he said so with his eyes and with his wavering gaze. “You’re here,” she stated. “You are. In my eyes you’re a knight.”

“Knight,” he muttered ironically. “No one has called me that in my life.”

“Then alone with no one save the grass, the sun and the moon, I am insane,” Charlotte said. “Don’t ever tell my mother. She’ll make me marry again and I have it in me only for one marriage.”

He chuckled. “Well. Appears I have none.”

She felt a strange sort of inward fall after he said that, so much so she hoped he didn’t see her mind working. So, she tried to soften everything that she had said previous, by telling him about her mother’s youth in Charleston South Carolina, and how if he thought the current fashion for women was impractical, in her mother’s youth, hoop skirts were once so vast and cumbersome, her mother once stepped on hers while doing the Virginia Reel and broke the wiring.

“I’ve done the Virginia Reel,” Arthur said fondly. “I can’t imagine doing it in one of those things.”

“You’ve done the Virginia Reel?”

He shrugged bashfully, and she vowed it would be another time before she asked. Patting Buell again, who seemed to be taken to her presence, Charlotte lifted her skirts and admitted she could not ride in her calico dress. But she had an idea.

“What sort of an idea?”

“Well. Wait here and see.”

He did as she asked and waited for her outside, and when she emerged in Cal’s work pants, Arthur smiled, and she laughed, admitting she didn’t think they would fit. Cal has slim hips and a backside that was quite slim as well. She didn’t. But she managed to get them on fine, and though she had done away with the hoops and the petticoats since leaving the city, and her bubble had shrunk considerably, she relished the feeling of having no bubble at all.

“This is wonderful,” she exclaimed, Arthur laughing once more. “If they saw me now at the Palmer House, they would die from shame. They would think…well.” She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I don’t know what they would think. Nothing good.”

“You like them?”

“I do,” she said, twirling for him, twirling like she did under the evening sun when she was alone, or, and it was a much more bittersweet memory, when she wore her wedding dress. But her wedding dress signified a new life for her, and in much the same way, putting on Cal’s pants, feeling the freedom and realizing how easier it was when she didn’t have to pull up any skirts for extra mobility was solidifying the same thing. It solidified her new life.

“More women should try out breeches,” Charlotte said. “It’s wonderful.”

“I know a woman who wears pants,” Arthur said. “Sadie. Sadie Adler. I think she’d agree.”

“Sadie Adler,” Charlotte repeated. “How did you come to meet her?”

“Her husband. He was killed, and we found her. We took her in.”

“Another widow you care for,” Charlotte muttered. “See? You are a good man.”

“Ah, you both know how to care for yourselves.”

“Only thanks to you.”

He didn’t believe it, but she would not quarrel with him for the moment. Attention turned back to Buell. With Buell, Arthur’s hope was that Charlotte could go into town if she wanted, travel longer distances as well.

“A horse makes carrying game a hell of a lot easier,” he said. “Though judging by that deer pelt you managed to do something.”

“Oh carrying that deer was easy,” Charlotte lied. The truth was that carrying the first one was excruciating. Halfway there she ended up dragging the carcass. But it was getting easier. At least Buell would make it better. She hoped.

“He was my friend, Hamish’s,” Arthur said. “He asked me to take him in.”

“Hamish died?”

Arthur nodded solemnly. “I liked him,” he said of his fallen friend. “Damn boar that did it. He told me to take Buell. But I think he likes you more than he likes me.”

“I can’t tell.”

“Well, it’s something you just know. Pepp—my horse, when I’m riding her I—”

“Wait. Is your horse named Pepper?”

“Uh...”

He kicked at the ground and she wondered if he was going to answer her. “Now Pepper is a fine name,” Charlotte insisted at his persisting silence.

“Not Pepper,” he replied, clearing his throat. “Peppermint.”

She stared, mouth agape. “Peppermint? You named a horse Peppermint?”

“My…well…I suppose you can say he’s my nephew—Jack named him. I said she liked Peppermints and he said that should be her name. It stuck.”

“I like it.”

“Really?”

“My mother had a terrier named Chouchou,” Charlotte said, noting how in French, the name meant “Cabbage Cabbage,” though her mother certainly didn’t know or care. “Believe me, Peppermint is a fine name.”

He patted her. “I don’t know. Chouchou isn’t too bad,” he said, Charlotte stifling her laughter at Arthur’s particular cadence of “Chouchou.” He did however, agree that Charlotte was right. Peppermint was a fine name. A fine name for a good girl.

“She’s a good girl,” Charlotte agreed, patting Peppermint’s mane. She recalled a far-off quote she read not too long ago. Happy is the horse, to bear the weight of Antony, spoken by Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s dramatization of the tragic couple. Happy was Arthur’s horse, she thought, to have Arthur Morgan.

One didn’t typically think of the bond riders had with their horses. Charlotte never did before she met Buell. She wondered if Arthur truly did see a kinship between herself and the animal. Both had lost someone dear to them, and both had the pleasure of meeting Arthur and gaining the vigor, and perhaps, to some extent, the will to move on. “Would you like to try to ride?” Arthur asked, and when Charlotte nodded, he told her she was going to have to put one foot in the stirrup.

“This is different from the other way,” Arthur said, referring to the side saddle method ladies from high society were supposed to utilize. “Your going to have to use the strength in your legs and, oh—”

He grabbed a hold of her waist before she could hoist herself up, quickly apologizing for his brashness.

“Arthur,” she said, “you don’t have to blush.”

“Alright then,” he replied, though that splash of pink would not leave, likely because he still did not let go of her waist. With one foot still in the stirrup, he told Charlotte to hold onto the saddle’s horn, make sure Buell was centered and straight, and then when she was ready, and he was ready for her, she could get on.

“Are you ready?” Arthur asked, a gravelly near whisper close to her ear.

“I think so,” Charlotte said. “The last time I was up, it was so high.”

“It is high I suppose. But you can do it.”

“What if I fall?”

“I’ll be here.”

She closed her eyes and with all the strength in her lower body she hoisted herself up, Arthur guiding her. “Get your leg over,” Arthur said, and when at last Charlotte was on the saddle, atop Buell the horse, she felt very, very tall.

“Not so bad right?”

Charlotte looked down at him. He was a little lower than she was comfortable with. “No,” she replied. “So far, so good. I can see though why they prefer women to side saddle however…”

But for the brief time she was on the horse in the Van Horn stables compared to then, she realized how little in control she was riding in the side saddle fashion. The horse only carried her along. Riding like real cowboy, she was the who controlled and guided.

“How can I tell if he likes me?” Charlotte asked, Arthur handing her the reins.

He patted Buell, as if asking him to be on his best behavior. “Oh, you’ll know if he didn’t.”

“Well, what was it like with you and Peppermint?”

He got her not too long ago, he said. He had accrued some money, (how, she could take a few guesses, though she would not ask.) and when he stood near her he sensed she had taken to him. It was like that with Boadicea as well—his other horse that passed away.

“She was a good horse,” Arthur said of his fallen friend. “Peppermint. She’s good too. So is this fella.”

He pat his mane again, stared into his eyes as if entreating him to be good to her. According to Arthur, one could tell if a horse was fond of you, just by sitting atop him.

“Horses are like humans,” he said. “They take some time. But then you have a friend for life.”

“Like you, Arthur Morgan?”

He grinned. “Sure. Like me.”

Two hours they spent together, Arthur not straying far from her side as he taught her how to canter and turn. It wasn’t so high up, Charlotte thought after a while. Or if it was, she learned how to not frighten at the height. Eventually Arthur mounted Peppermint, and by her side, he rode along with Charlotte and Buell as she learned how to ride and Buell learned how to get used to her. They trotted together past Cal’s grave, a little near the clearing where the river was for the horses to drink and graze. Eventually they dismounted, that a while other experience, as Charlotte worried she would fall. Once again, Arthur reminded her was near, he would not let her fall.

“Come here,” he said, outstretching his arms. “You’ll be alright.”

“I…oh…”

Their bodies touched in many places as she planted her feet on the ground again. She squeezed his shoulder in thanks, caught a glimpse of his blue-green eyes from underneath his hat.

“It gets easier,” he promised. “But I think you’re a born rider.”

“I hope so,” she admitted. “I’d like to be good at some things.”

“Ah come on. You make a good stew and a good cup of coffee.”

She felt herself blush. “Speaking of which…would you to go back and have some?”

“Sure.”

They let the horses rest for a bit. Before Charlotte could attempt to get back on Buell, this time all by herself, she felt Arthur hover behind her, wanting to say something that maybe he shouldn’t.  
He was glad he chose to say it, even though it was another apology.

“You’ve apologized so much already,” Charlotte said.

“I didn’t mean to worry you.”

She suspected she would always worry about him, at least partially. “Always come back when you say you will. That’s all I ever want or wanted. A promise broken is—"

“I understand.”

She didn’t mean to be accusatory. She only needed to know. “Do you?”

“I’ll protect you Charlotte. I—”

“No, don’t promise that. You taught me how to protect me already. You’re right by the way. I can.” His eyes were very blue, she noticed as she stood with him. “Only promise you’ll come back, and you will come back when you say you will be back. Or try,” she amended. “Just try.”

“Are you lonely Charlotte?”

She stroked Buell’s mane. “I think I made a friend,” she said. “It won’t be so bad anymore. Besides. I could go into town now, and—”

“What the hell is going on here?”

Part of her was always base and primal. Part of everyone was always base and primal. She admired those like Arthur who molded it into a dignified form of rugged masculinity in moments of quiet and tactful survivability when there was danger. He warned her before of the “Murfrees” near Annesburg, she knew within moments the man with a rifle that accosted them then by the river were part of that brood. The man had similar parts that seemed to belong to faces not of his own, long and stringy hair, and ratted clothes paired with bare feet. Both pointed a rifle at Arthur. They glanced at her, studied her—the curious woman with a silver thread in her hair, wearing clothes meant for a man. She sensed it—they were going to mock, but Arthur moved…he moved when he should not have, when he could have ended him then and there with a shot that would have rang through the plains.

He moved to her side without a second thought, though Charlotte thought that perhaps he shouldn’t. And then, all was perfectly still.

“This place is ours,” the man spat.

“It’s a free country.”

He snorted, uninterested in Arthur and uninterested in Charlotte as well for that matter. He patted Peppermint, and if before Charlotte did not believe Arthur when he claimed horses to be a lot like people, she did then. His horse recoiled at the foreign touch, ears and tail twitching.

“Nice horse,”

“You can’t have her.”

When his filthy gaze was on her Charlotte straightened, but her eyes did not waver. “Sure I can,” he said, grabbing a hold of the reins. When Peppermint did not move—she only moved for Arthur—he dropped the reins and pointed his rifle back at Arthur.

“Hands up,” he ordered. “No sudden movements.”

“Arthur…”

“it’s okay Charlotte,” Arthur said, moving away. “It’s going to be okay. It’s—”

“Arthur!”

The brood hit Arthur’s middle with the back of the rifle. Off balance Arthur fell, sinking to the grass. “No sudden movements!” he ordered, gun pointing at him. “Or I’ll blow your head off.”  
He cackled and it was an awful sound, an evil sound with none of Arthur’s warmness when he laughed.

“There’s not going to be enough of you left to put on bread…” he sneered. “and your lady friend is gonna see it all…”

He thought he had the upper hand with Arthur on the ground. He thought he could shoot him before Arthur even dreamed of reaching for his gun at his holster. But what never entered the realm of possibilities was that his “lady friend,” his Charlotte Balfour, knew how to use a rifle, and that Charlotte Balfour would take Arthur’s rifle from his saddlebag, point it at the back of his head, and pull the trigger with no other thought than her friend was in trouble, and she could do something about it.

The gun shot was so loud. It was always loud. Charlotte noticed it the first time she shot Cal’s rifle and the bullet pierced the wood floors. It was loud as well when she left the cabin and shot the first buck. They didn’t tell you they made noises sometimes after you shot them, how distressing the whimpers of the animal could be. The man that would have hurt Arthur and then would have hurt her made no noises, as the bullet pierced through his head and he crumpled to the ground. She could not see his face, knew not what expression he had before she shot him, but blood soaked the grass, and that silent sound was more sickening than anything else she had ever heard. It was like the silence after Cal passed…those ragged and labored breaths he took before the rest was silence…

Arthur rose. She didn’t look at him as he took the gun from her hands, putting it back in his saddle bag. Her hands shook.

“Charlotte? Are you okay?”

His hands were warm when he took a hold of hers. “Charlotte?”

“Arthur?”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I should have realized that—”

“It doesn’t matter.” She squeezed his hand. “See? I can protect you too.”

He caught her before she could fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's true that in the 1800s, one couldn't say "leg" in public, and it was referred to as "limbs"  
> Also, author has never rode a horse before, please forgive me.


	6. Chapter 6

Charlotte didn’t faint. Her legs only gave out. Or at least, that was what she said of the whole falling and catching matter Arthur did as she stumbled backward with the rifle’s kickback, and then forward as her legs wouldn’t work with her. It was a fact she was proud of when Arthur steadied her.

“See? I’m awake,” she declared, one hand spread on his chest, the other holding the rifle still.

“You’re awake,” he agreed.

“I didn’t hesitate.”

He agreed with that too. “No. You didn’t.”

She pat him to reassure, almost too hard. “Now, Mother always said it’s in a lady’s right to faint once or twice in her life, but no, not for me. No. I just shot a man, but…oh.”

Her face went pale, her eyes wide when she caught the Murfree brood she shot in the head from the corner of her eye. Her horror and shock were two things he had seen before, many times. It was different with Charlotte. It was all because of him.

Again, maybe nothing new. But Charlotte...

Charlotte. Poor, poor Charlotte, who…

Fuck. She didn’t deserve it.

He squeezed her arm, but this time he was almost too hard. “You’ve done good Charlotte.”

“…the body…” she managed, still pale. “what are we going to—oh.”

“Charlotte…Charlotte!”

He steadied her again, taking the rifle and strapping it behind his back. She shouldn’t have tried to get a better look, but she did and he was going to have to re-forge her into quiet and calm, dignified Charlotte. She wasn’t going to faint, she said so again, but the ground wasn’t working well with her feet. That was what he told her anyway when she muttered about how she was falling. Yes, he had seen this, whatever it was you wanted to call it. It had all happened before and it looked differently in different people. Some said nothing at all. Some pretended it didn’t bother them, and maybe it didn’t at first, but that was only for the bother, the regret, and the more to come later and sting harder. Others though turned into different versions of themselves for a temporary matter, for that all to change them in subtle ways Arthur knew. He was the third. Charlotte was the third. Funny, how a man and woman who had such different experiences prior—society lady and outlaw gunslinger—to end up together living and carrying in similar ways.

Though, of course, he knew she was far better than him, and always would be for so many reasons.

Charlotte. She did that for him. She changed for him. So much. The one he had known was a proud, dignified, forthcoming woman that was growing grittier at the edges. Yet matters beyond her control turned her not into a young scared girl, but a shell-shocked woman of a thousand years, who knew and realized that man made it so easy to take a life away.

He was no good at this sort. Not when they were too much alike.

But he had an idea.

He led her away, near to the side of the river. “Charlotte,” he said, cradling his arm around her, “there’s something I need you to do for me.”

She looked straight ahead, to the other side of the bank. “What Arthur?”

“Can you catch a fish for me? Then we can take it back. I’ll cook it over a fire.”

“I’ve never caught a fish in my life,” she muttered.

“And you ain’t never shot a deer before a few months ago neither, but you did that. They’re ain’t nothing to catching a fish. It’s easy work. Relaxing too.”

She blinked, peering at him. “But you said you weren’t good at it.”

Perceptive woman as she was, he sure should have known she would remember and see through the lie. He decided it then, damn it, to tell her the truth.

“Charlotte. I’m going to take care of the body.”

She took a deep breath, nodding but going back to avoiding his eyes again. “I see. You wanted to distract me.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“You can’t go.”

“I do have to do something,” he reasoned, “or—"

“But what if another comes back?” she asked. “What if—”

“They won’t come back,” he stated, his voice calm so she would calm. “That one must have been a deserter. I reckon he wouldn’t have needed the horse if he wasn’t.”

“He didn’t want Buell,” Charlotte said, casting a glance toward him. “Shame. He’s a fine horse, a good boy.”

“He is. And he’ll be here with you.”

“I’ll be here with me too.”

He stung, and the sting burned so much right down to his core he hated himself for ever coming back with the god damn horse.

“I’m going to be fine Arthur,” she said, patting him again—gentler this time. “I’d do it again.”

It stung the hardest to hear that, that silent acceptance. It was one thing to have to hunt to survive, another thing to accept kill or be killed. He should have acted sooner, should have done something. Charlotte should not have had to do that.

“I’ll keep you safe next time,” he promised.

“No. We keep each other safe.”

He wasn’t much of a praying man, but he hoped to whoever was in the sky that the gentle, wondering, dreamy outlines in her brown eyes never left. That no matter how hard life had hardened her, she would still want to dance under the sun to a song only she heard.

“We will.”

It was a promise. Another one. but he didn’t regret any as he handed her the rifle again and she strapped it around her back. From his saddle bag he also took his rod and a bit of bread for some bait. He cast the line far out and handed it to her, instructing her on how to fish, even if his own skills were lacking.

“Only reel when you’ve worn it out,” he said.

Nodding, she held the rod and studied the water with so much intensity, he laughed and said she would feel the fish tug and pull. “How long does it take?” she asked, and he replied it depended on matters and the type of bait used. Sometimes the things were stubborn and wanted nothing to do with the bait. They were already at a disadvantage—he had no worms or crickets, and as his friend Javier said, it was all in the bait. But the truth of the matter he wasn’t so much interested in the fish as he was calming and easing her.

He didn’t expect one fish to go so quickly to the bait, in fact, he didn’t expect any fish at all, but that was what happened. She gasped, exclaiming “it’s tugging!” and Arthur put his hands on her shoulders, told her to breath, and wear that fish out.

“But gently,” he said, gently in turn. “Don’t tire yourself out.”

“Oh, I probably already have already, but I won’t with this fi—oh. Wait. Arthur…” Her concentration hardened. “I think that I might have gotten it to—”

“Reel it in.”

His hands still on her shoulders, she started to reel. She was a tall woman. She backed up into him and her hair was under his nose. It smelled like grass and earth as she smelled like grass and earth, and she gasped as the fish’s luck ran out with the wire and flew out of the water. Charlotte took it off the hook, grimacing at it’s scaly and slippery feel, but as she said, she had skinned a deer and could deal with that. She shot a man, and could deal with that. A fish was, comically, just a fish.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Just a fish.”

She moved away from him. His hands were still on her shoulders and when she drifted away it felt foreign. But she had a wonder, as she referred to it as, a wonder why man had no trouble shooting an animal or catching a fish, but killing another man was where the line was drawn and where the law had to intervene.

“I’ve killed a lot of animals,” he admitted. “Haven’t caught as many fish, but have caught enough.”

“It was still moving around,” she said, sad and wondering as she was. “It still wanted to live.”

“That’s in all of us.”

“Not always.”

She sighed, putting the fish down on the ground to begin her collection. Surely as he gave her more bread and she put it on the hook and casting it out, another fish took the bait. Seemed every fish in the river knew Charlotte Balfour was out and they wanted a glance of her.

“You’re right,” Arthur said. “Not always.”

Before he could think any longer, she confessed a moment in her own life, giving him peace not to think of his. But she looked at him after and it made him too sad anyway. He didn’t look away though—he didn’t want to look away.

“Not anymore,” she said. “I have a legacy to make. Even without Cal, I need to see it through.”

“Charlotte…”

“I also want to live.”

Silver threads at the top of her hair, too young for them and yet too old at the same time. “Good,” he said, “because you’re stronger than anything.”

“I know you’re right.”

He coughed and lowly he said he needed to be rid of the body and take care of it. “Charlotte,” he said, “I know. You will you be okay. Don’t hesitate again.”

She nodded and he did something he wouldn’t have done if it were any other time. But brave and strong woman, a thought that ran through his mind, that didn’t leave when things got too hard, when it would have been easier to leave and go back to an old life instead of try again to make a new one alone. He put his too rough, too big hand on her gentle and soft cheek. The male did that in the book Tilly and Mary Beth read to him to the female character. He was still locked to the bed and all he could do was be glad he was at least somewhat entertained. He wasn’t going to complain about their choices when the two were kind to him, but damn romances, they could make things that really meant nothing mean something. Lingering glances and touches that were only supposed to reassure, those books turned them into damn events.

“Please come back.”

She said that, and he had the thought—she did make him think a lot, it was a thing about her.) maybe their glances or touch wasn’t an event like the theatre or a picture show, but a moment between the two that she wasn’t going to ever forget, and neither was he.

“I’ll come back,” he promised. “I ain’t gonna lie ever again. I’ll come back when I say I am.”

“You’re a good man Arthur Morgan. And don’t you dare say I don’t know you really, because I damn well do.”

Hearing her say “damn” was like hearing foul and unsavory words from a doe. But Charlotte wasn’t a doe, he told himself as she continued to fish, laughing when another got a hold of the bread bait and she moved the rod back and forth to tire it out. She was a woman who learned and survived like he was a man who learned and survived, and it was funny, because though she talked about being the indolent heroine in a novel, she was neither indolent nor a heroine, just a survivor.

But that was a lie. She saved him. She was his heroine.

He came up slowly after he took care of matters, leaving the body in a secluded place where it would fall back to the earth. It would fall back, and no one would know how Charlotte Balfour saved Arthur Morgan from getting shot and robbed of his horse save Arthur Morgan and Charlotte Balfour themselves unless they told it to others. Since his unpleasant but necessary errand, she had accumulated five perches of various sizes as a pile on the side with only the small loaf he had left for her.

“Quite the fisherwoman,” he commented and praised. “I see you’re a natural. Next time I come back, I’ll bring some better bait.”

She smirked, casting the line out again with one graceful swoop. He must have been visibly impressed, she told him she had to be a natural with at least one thing in the wilderness. Her record would be far too embarrassing otherwise.

“Ah, maybe that’s not true,” she amended as she caught the sixth perch. “I didn’t hesitate.”

She said it so bitterly. How often would she go back to that moment in her mind? He hoped not often. He hoped not at all, that bastard deserved none of it.

“You did the right thing,” he had to assure her.

“It was so easy.”

“It can be.”

She said he must have killed many before. There was no use lying or evading—yes, he replied. He did. Some that deserved it, others who maybe didn’t.

“Who deserved it Arthur?”

“Those hooded bastards. That man too Charlotte. He would have—”

“I know.”

And there he was again, guilty for bringing his sullied and hollow self to a woman that danced under the sun and shot and killed a man for him, even if he was no good and harmed others.

Yet if he didn’t ever bring himself to her that first time…

It depressed him so much, that if he never got that tip about a rich couple up near Annesburg, he may have never known Charlotte or disappointed her by not coming back. Maybe years would have passed and she would have been found dead, maybe by him, only to become a nameless and tragic maid instead of the brave heroine she deserved to be. Sad, he would have thought, but he would not have been moved. He wouldn’t have never known what she deserved. How she moved him then, how he hated to see her soft resigning to the fact that she had killed and was standing near a killer. She didn’t deserve to be burdened with his friendship or with his troubles. If she had a lick of sense maybe she would have let that ingrate shoot him dead.

He hoped she wouldn’t have buried him next to his husband in this thing his mind cooked up. It was another thing he didn’t deserve.

“You’re an outlaw,” Charlotte stated, putting the rod up, leaning against Buell. He had drifted near her and let her lean on him. Stubborn fool never let him.

“I am,” he said. “I’m a wanted man. I ain’t so good.”

“You found me because you wanted to rob me, didn’t you?”

Oh come now, she said to his fallen eyes, looking down at her pant-covered legs. She wasn’t so dumb or stupid. Maybe with some things, like eating found berries before making sure they weren’t poisonous, but not with putting together pieces of a puzzle.

“It was the thing to do,” she said. “Sitting in a room in our big hoops that impeded movements, my husband and I put together all the clues and figured out what was really going on with Chicago high society.” She smiled, reminiscing. “Mr. Kempler had a hobby he wouldn’t want his wife to know. Do you know how we found out? He couldn’t get that stain of red off his collar.”

“That would do it.”

She wasn’t looking away from him, not anymore. “You didn’t rob me,” she said. “You saved me. And then you felt so bad you didn’t take my money.”

“You saved yourself.”

“I told you. There was a moment where I thought it would be alright to die—welcome even. I didn’t have that spark anymore after Cal died, but it hasn’t left since I met you Arthur. Not that you being here makes me want to live more. I understand that implication. But—”

“I understand,” he said.

“I’m not a simpering, indolent woman who has to be rescued. Though I do appreciate chivalry,” she made sure to note for him to think of at a later date when things were not as they were. “So few men are knights. But you, you’re a knight, King Arthur.”

“King Arthur?” He ran a hand through his unkempt hair. “Why no one has ever called me that.”

“Well, I get to be the first,” she said proudly.

“Charlotte. Thank you.”

“Someone should tell you you’re a knight.”

His cheeks grew hot. “That’s appreciated,” he said, kicking at the ground, “but that’s not why I was thanking you.”

He hadn’t told her yet, thank you for saving my ass. Or if he did, he had to tell her like he meant it. He damn well did.

“I’m going to protect those I care about,” she said. “I thought it would be a child, but I suppose, well…”

“Oh?” he straightened, sticking his hands on his belt. “Am I a child Charlotte Balfour?”

“All men are boys, I’m convinced,” she said with a laugh. “Some women are girls underneath too, but many aren’t. My mother wasn’t. I certainly am. I only meant—”

He nodded. He knew. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she admitted. “A little Cal would have been quite the joy. A little me, maybe less so, but I would have loved her anyway. But Arthur… _Arthur_ …I don’t want to think of that right now. I want…”

“What?”

She grabbed his arm and led him. “Let’s be a boy and girl.”

He didn’t feel so much like a boy though, when he was with her. He felt an awful lot like that knight she said he was.


	7. Chapter 7

Even after everything she had been through, everything she had done the past month or so, Charlotte couldn’t fathom how one slept on a lumpy bedroll in the middle of the woods as her Arthur Morgan so often did.

“It seems so frightening, to camp out by yourself,” she said, keeping to herself how uncomfortable it must have been on one’s back.

“Not so frightening,” Arthur replied, finishing the last of the fish. By the river he made a campfire, grilling her catch over the flames. They ate the lunch of grilled perch, beans, and peaches, the two gulping directly from the can, afterwards spilling a chocolate bar for desert. Arthur’s nephew Jack, he said, gave him the candy a while ago as thanks for a book he brought him, and it was high time he ate it.

“So. Is Jack really your nephew, or…?”

He told her the truth, he wasn’t, but to him he was “Uncle Arthur,” so what else could Jack be to him? Charlotte nodded and agreed, because even she could understand that family had more to do with bonds than blood.

“See?” Arthur asked of the fire, and the small picnic area of sorts he made for the two of them, “not so bad, is it?”

“No, I like it out here,” she clarified, sniffing that pine and dirt and water, savoring the small paradise. It was what she wanted when she first moved, what she thought it would always be like. Though it didn’t turn out to be that way, the least she could do was indulge while she had it. She also had Arthur with her, there to indulge with it with.

“What I meant was,” she continued, “not sleeping under a roof, but in a tent and on the ground…anyone could find you…”

“I’m a light sleeper.”

“It still must be frightening.”

He shook his head. “Hm. Maybe not so much.”

“Not so much?” Charlotte asked. “Alone, in nothing but a tent…alone…”

“I have her with me,” he replied, gesturing to his horse. “It’s not so bad.”

Maybe it wasn’t, she contemplated as she savored the last bit of chocolate. He offered her a swig of Kentucky bourbon he had in his satchel, but upon declining it, he set it away. He settled on the candy like she did, nose scrunching up. She took it he wasn’t used to very sweet things. A certain cook in her home often spoiled Charlotte with sweet treats, something she hadn’t had in ages since uprooting herself. Livvy used to give her those very bars so long as she promised she wouldn’t spoil her dinner. Eating it with Arthur reminded her of those times.

The chocolate was good, the company was better, and she was slowly coming back to herself, slowly getting better, slowly forgetting the sound of the rifle and the blood pooling against that spot on the grass. It was so easy yet she would do it again. That was the scariest part of all.

“Hm,” she muttered, imagining herself sleeping under the stars like Arthur so often did. “You also have the stars.” Maybe with the stars, he felt less lonely and less like he was the only one in the world. That was how the stars always made her feel, and the moon. Sometimes she was gone though. But she always came back, like him.

“Stars don’t talk to you though,” Arthur said.

“Neither can Peppermint,” she pointed out.

“No,” he said, positively boyish. “She talks to me.”

“Well, what does she say?”

“This and that,” he said, straightening in pretend indignance. “She tells me when she needs to be cleaned and when she wants an apple. She’s ain’t so loud though, unlike others I know.”

“I don’t think I’m loud,” Charlotte said with that same mock indignance as he used.

“It’s loud at camp,” he clarified. “Lot of activity. One night Sean and Karen, they were just going at it, and— oh.”

“Oh, it happens,” Charlotte said when common decency and decorum halted him from continuing. “People are people. Living away from rules of civility, I can imagine how things would be.” She searched for the right word. “More open, maybe.”

“In a way, maybe. Sure.”

“ _Soah_.”

His eyes narrowed. He smirked. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No,” she put her hands on her hips, mirrored what he did as well. “I like the way you talk. It’s like leather and honey and it’s different from me. It’s nice.”

“Leather and honey?” he repeated, quizzical and amused. “Huh. Leather and honey. Okay.”

“I know, I’m strange,” she muttered. “You can say it.”

“Not so much.”

It surprised her how quickly he said that. “Maybe a little,” he said after a pause, “but I’ve met some stranger people. Probably anyway.” He chuckled, reminiscing. “There was a man named Margaret who—”

“Wait. There was a man named Margaret?”

He nodded. “Margaret had an act. Used all sorts of animals from around the world to get people to give him money. Or that’s what he advertised anyway. His first trick was wearing a dress, because according to him, people don’t want to see a man tame a bunch of wild animals. Much better if a woman does it. I mean, sure, I guess. He also had a mustache, so I’m not sure how many people believed him. Maybe he just liked the dress,”

“There are advantages to dresses,” Charlotte admitted, though she was enjoying how easy it was to sit on the grass in trousers versus a large and bustling skirt. “Maybe we should all just try each other’s clothes.”

“Maybe,” he mused, grinning to himself slightly. She had a wonder if a time passed for Arthur, where his woman thought it would be pleasant and sweet to don his shirt, or perhaps his hat. Charlotte loved wearing Cal’s shirts, though she could only do it at night andat very specific times. It smelled like cologne and the rose oil he always used after he shaved his whiskers. It was such a sweet thing, to wear his shirt and see him alight in something that was his. It was a sweet thing to think of Arthur that way, at the gentle mercy to the one he loved. He wasn’t one who typically experienced gentle mercy, a sweet moment alone with a sweet little remembrance. She hoped his time with her was at least a small and welcome reprieve from everything else, if not a gentle mercy with someone he was fond of.

“Margaret had a…zebra, I think it was,” Arthur continued, going back to the story at hand. Though the “zebra” was really a mule painted in black and white stripes.

“Paint got all over my pants,” he said. “I thought the whole thing was a damn trick. Next thing I knew, people were saying there was a lion at the Emerald Ranch. I thought they were seeing thing, but the next thing I know, there’s a big cat that’s lunging at me.”

“A lion?” Charlotte asked. “They don’t even have one of those at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. I’ve only seen them in books.”

“Big thing,” Arthur said. “Mean thing. Had to shot it. Almost felt bad for it, even if it did try to eat me.”

“He was uprooted from his home,” Charlotte muttered, wondering how on earth Margaret with a mustache and dress procured a lion from Africa.

“So were you.”

Her thoughts drifted from lions prowling in Africa to herself. The statement surprised her, compelled her. Was she an exotic curiosity to him? A woman who he taught to survive, though she was far from a home she first knew, a woman who had killed for him? She wanted to be Charlotte, his friend who protected him. Nothing more.

“I uprooted myself,” she corrected. “I chose this. I don’t think he did.”

The blades of grass were soft against her palm, and she asked him, softly, because he began it, “did you?”

It was presumptuous to ask, or even assume that he was uprooted. But one didn’t start as an outlaw, or she hoped at least. One was drawn to it, through one reason or other.

“I always drifted,” he replied. “This ain’t nothing new.”

Everything new to him was nothing new. Poetic.

“Who was your father?” Charlotte asked, for of course he had to be born. “And your mother? What was she like?”

“Sad.”

She was sorry to hear it, sorrier for how it was the first thing that sprung from his thoughts when he was asked directly. His father though, he said, he was no good. Dutch took him in after he died.

“Who’s Dutch?”

Dutch, she learned, was the patriarch of the Van Der Linde gang. She suspected he told her secrets he shouldn’t have, but by her lady’s honor, she swore she would keep his secrets to her gave. Dutch found Arthur and took him in along with another man named Hosea, Charlotte gathering he was the co-patriarch of sorts. They taught him to read when he couldn’t before, and they gave him a home. Not a home to put down roots, but a home that drifted from place to place. People had come, some had died, he said with a great sorrow, but they were a unit that worked together. They had a bout of bad luck after bout of bad luck recently, but Dutch was hoping that it would turn around. He had a plan.

“Tahiti is his plan,” Arthur said. “All he can think about lately is Tahiti. Shit. I don’t know what’s in Tahiti except damn palm trees.”

“And sand, I hear,” Charlotte added. “Beautiful water though, so the stories say.”

She looked to the river, which wasn’t so hard to look at itself. Chicago had the lake, though she never got to enjoy its marvels. Arthur, looking at her looking at the water. asked how she felt about water.

“I can’t say,” she replied. “Seems frightening, but my grandfather on my mother’s side was a seaman. That’s how he earned his fortune before settling in Charleston and putting some money in a plantation. New money you know—but better than no money at all. Caused quite the fuss when my mother and father married.”

“Seaman?” His brows raised, amused. “Seems adventures are in your blood.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

He didn’t need to relay all she had done. They shared a knowing smile, and though Charlotte didn’t know her grandfather well before he passed, she felt a little like him as she sat by the water. “He told my brother and I stories of the sea,” she said. “the sea, and a great whale. I think he stole most of it from this book—I can’t remember the author, but it was about a captain and some man named Ishmael who—”

“ _Moby Dick_.”

“Yes,” she said, remembering and more than a little impressed. “That was the book. Grandpa always liked it, though no one else did.”

“Hosea had a copy once. It was too much for me.”

She asked him if there was a novel he did like. He thought for a moment before offering Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Charlotte had never heard of it before.

“I’ll bring it here, next time,” Arthur promised, Charlotte thinking of that, next time. “It’s a poem in a longer book, _Leaves of Grass._ Long. But good. It’s not like those tales of knights you read probably, but it’s still good.”

She had to point out she read more than that. “I read all sorts Shakespeare, The Brontes, Mary Shelley,” she listed. She told him he would like _Frankenstein,_ or she held high hopes he would read it and like it. Many didn’t, and she craved a soul to talk about it with.

“It’s a good novel about man’s folly, going where they shouldn’t, what it means to be human,” she said, trying to sell it for Mary, who deserved to sell many copies for years and years to come. She spoke as if she knew her, though maybe she did know her, in a way. She read her thoughts, read those extensions of her and her being. It was romantic to think she knew her.

“What it means to be human?” Arthur asked. “Ah, I don’t rightly know.”

“Me neither,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t think Mary knows either, but she explores. But being here,” she regarded the small Eden around, “having nothing but my thoughts, most of the time anyway, well…”

It made her know more than ever how dangerous yet beautiful a thought could be. She shared it with Arthur, who didn’t think her words the ramblings of an isolated, lonely woman, but something real that he himself felt.

“I go off a lot, be by myself,” Arthur said as he considered her words. “The gang—Dutch, Hosea, Lenny, Charles, Tilly and them, they’re my family, but—”

“Family can drive us mad, I know.”

“It’s not so bad to be alone,” he said. “I like it.”

“Only sometimes.”

He shifted. “Only sometimes,” he agreed.

He had another candy bar. He shared it with her, letting the pieces melt in his mouth like Charlotte did. As much money as they had, the Vales didn’t buy much chocolate. Livvy always brought some for her when she was a child, her treat to her. She shared with Arthur how she would try to make each piece last, something she carried over when she was old enough to begin drinking wine. One small sip, savor that sip and the acidity and the tart to make it last. It wasn’t Arthur’s style particularly—the Guarma rum and bourbon he sometimes indulged in went down fast. Charlotte laughed, because there was no other way to drink those drinks. All down or none at all.

“I’ve never been drunk.”

The man with the misshapen face. The sound, the silence. It was the most horrible thing.

She had never been drunk. Maybe it would help her forget.

“I don’t want to get you to try.”

His eyes didn’t stray from her. “You weren’t,” she said, wonder of what it would be like not enough to want to get her to try. “When Cal died, I still didn’t want to,” she admitted. “After today, I still don’t want to. My father, he—”

But he understood, because, he said, his real father was like that as well. He never wanted to be like him. Charlotte didn’t know his father, or what he was like, but once again, she reminded him that he was a kind and good man, that sat with her and talked with her, gave her a new friend, when he didn’t have to. Someone else could have washed their hands of her. Another, crueler person wouldn’t have stopped at all. Why she reminded him so often and all the time he mentioned it seemed to be innate and carved onto her being. If fate were to bring her a kind man that doubted, she would be the gentle, but not too gentle woman that reminded him he shouldn’t doubt about some things.

When they packed up, a book fell from Arthur’s saddlebags as he rummaged around and rearranged. Charlotte, in thinking she would help him, picked up the book that turned out to be not a book at all, but a leather-bound journal, the page she was on filled with different pictures. One of a raspberry brush, labeled as such, the other of a ferocious looking bear.

“You’re an artist?” she asked. “I didn’t know.”

“Oh, you found that thing? Charlotte, I—”

It was his journal, she realized as she flipped and saw the writing. She wouldn’t dare read his private thoughts, but the drawings sparked her interest. She was on one of a raccoon, curious and upright. But no, she would not read his thoughts. She knew how it was—she kept a journal herself sometimes. Not even Cal read it.

“I always wished I could draw like this,” she said. “That’s all. But—oh…”

It was her, on the very next page In shaded pencils, her hair in a side braid like she was wearing then, the thread of silver carefully invoked through not as dark strokes at the certain spot at the top of her head. He depicted her with her hand resting upon her cheek, dreamy and far off, thinking of knights or thinking of an adventure, thinking of when Arthur would be back.

“This is how you see me?” she asked.

“I see different parts of you,” he offered after a beat. “That’s one. I’m sorry if I—Well, draw things sometimes, helps me think. I’m sorry if—shit.”

He blushed, embarrassment evident by the red on his cheeks and the way he shifted. She didn’t mean to embarrass, didn’t even mean to creep into something that was private and his.

“Maybe you should do more,” she said, handing him his journal back. “I’m curious about the different parts, though I did like that one. I look happy. And I think you made me look rather nice. Should let me draw you sometime. I’m not that good, but—” She shrugged. “I think I would like to try.”

“It would be an honor to be drawn by you.”

Come back to my home, she said before he rode back with her. She knew he didn’t mind sleeping under the stars, but she had an extra bed he could use. He nodded, told her would be honored. She wasn’t worthy of so many honors.

“Sometimes the ground hurts my back anyway,” he said. “Could use a break from it."

With ease, she mounted Buell. He was impressed with no small measures. “I wondered if it hurt,” she said.

When they got back and dismounted, leaving the horses out to graze, he came over and he squeezed her shoulder. It burned where he touched.

“You shouldn’t be alone today anyway,” he said.

He knew she liked to be alone. But…

She didn’t want to be alone that night. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

His eyes weren’t just blue. They were blue and green and a little sad, but a nice color. They sat on her porch before they retired, a boy and a girl, and Charlotte thought how living in his gaze was like living a thousand lifetimes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks so much for the kudos/comments. they both have cleared my complexion! :) hope you guys continue to enjoy! :)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back with an update! I said originally this was going to be short chaptered fic, but....uh...I lied, I love them too much and it's def going to be longer. Maybe not like fifty chapters, but long :)
> 
>  
> 
> thank you for reading!

He was far too big for the bed. His feet dangled over the edge and the blue blanket barely covered him. It wasn’t meant for him though, it was meant for someone much smaller.

A wave of sorrow for what she lost seized his chest. But something lost, something gained. He hoped. He hoped a lot of things for Charlotte Balfour, the latest one being that he hadn’t ruined her with what he did. He just wanted to help her, bring her a friend when he couldn’t be there. Instead he asked her to murder for him.

He couldn’t fall asleep. As he tried, he cursed himself for ever thinking of robbing her blind. He didn’t get any money but something far worse than the inevitable guilt of stealing from someone he didn’t know. He got to know her and like her—respect her even. He got a want to keep seeing her and talking with her, because talking with her was good and easy in a life that was neither good or easy. Tilly understood a lot of things, so did Mary-Beth and Karen. He liked talking with Lenny and Hosea too. Dutch not so much anymore, too blinded. But Charlotte—

Charlotte. Free Charlotte, away Charlotte, tumbling rose Charlotte that danced barefoot Charlotte…

He cursed himself and he cursed his sweet repose for someone who should have stayed nameless and faceless.

But would she have ended up in the ground if he hadn’t? Was it better for him to suffer in his sweet repose than have Charlotte Balfour gone? She killed for him. He wasn’t going to forget it. Stupid, dumb him, she killed for him. He couldn’t ask for that from a sweet repose.

He stirred when he heard the noises. He worried first that it was robbers like him or other bad men far worse than he was, but as he got up from Charlotte’s too small bed for her unborn child, he realized it was crying. She was crying. He was no good with crying. When Tilly was captured by that gang she used to run with and he chased after them with Miss Grimshaw yelling in his ear, he found her crying in that place they took her. He was no good at comforting, but he put his arm around her all the same. She thanked him later, though he apologized for his inadequate ways of handling it. It wasn’t what he did, just that he cared. Or so she said anyway. He was a good person that cared. The thing was, he knew he cared. That was his undoing. Mary Linton knew that above all.

He threw his shirt back on before he knocked tentatively at her door. No answer. He called her name. Again, no answer.

He tapped his bare foot against the wooden floor. Would he ignore her? It seemed wrong to ignore her cries, but then again, he was no good at comforting. Was it because of him that she cried, and what she did for him? He deserved none of her tears.

No. He was too all-mighty and too self important, he thought. She couldn’t be weeping for him. Her tears were more suited for her fallen mate and partner, and the life they could have had. She was so brave to want to live it alone. It wasn’t easy to walk alone.

He took a lantern from the kitchen table, took a deep breath, and opened the door. A curtain of dark hair covered her face, pale hands covering her eyes. The women in camp typically wore their day clothes to bed, more so out of necessity than anything, while Arthur did the same at camp. Sometimes he rented a room in a saloon wherever he was close to where he could bathe and enjoy clean sheets against bare skin. He should have figured she wouldn’t sleep in her day clothes, but the last time he saw a woman in a white nightdress, it had been some time ago. Her mother wouldn’t approve of a brute bombarding in her room, but he got the feeling her mother didn’t approve of most things Charlotte Balfour did. Her shoulders shook as she sat at the edge of her bed, her bare feet against the cold wooden floor. He was dangerously close to seeing ankles, the scandal.

He called out her name again. She didn’t answer.

He came over. She wiped tears from her eyes but she didn’t look at him. Setting the lantern down on the bedside table, he felt too looming over her, too imposing. He kneeled. He almost touched her thigh, thinking of how her palm subtly touched his that afternoon as they ate, the brief but intimate contact making him nearly choke on the canned peaches. She meant to reassure but she did so much more. Charlotte Balfour did so much for him.

He didn’t touch her thigh, but he did touch her shoulder, squeezed. “Hey there,” he said, feeling a victory as she uncovered her face. “what’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

“Dream,” she muttered, wiping away tears, voice craked.

“Nightmare?”

She shook her head. “Cal and I. We were happy. Wildflowers. Then one of those awful men came. I shot him. I—”

Her hands trembled and he couldn’t see her dark eyes again. He got up from the floor and sat next to her on her bed, the bed she and her husband shared once. No one ever told him after Mary left, the hardest part would be sleeping alone. Funny how when she was gone, he even missed how she would steal most of the covers.

“Charlotte…”

“I can’t do this Arthur.” She slapped her hands against her thigh in defeat. “I can’t be alone.”

“No. No. Shhh…”

He sat. He wrapped an arm around her, and he cradled her as she wept. Her hair was long when it wasn’t pulled up or in a braid. Long and thick and luxurious like Mary admired in Abigail. It spilled onto his lap and his free hand. Soft.

“I envy you, you know,” she muttered. “You have a family. You don’t have to be alone. I like to be alone, sometimes, yes, but—”

But she was used to having him.

Do you know what it’s like, to be stifled and thrust with expectation after expectation? She asked him. He said truthfully, he did in a way. In a different way yes, but a way all the same. His father was an ingrate, so therefore he should be too. He proved his father’s image all right when Dutch and Hosea picked up off the streets. Those were the expectations of his life. She shared her own, how she was always supposed to get married to someone of high society, how at least she managed to marry someone she loved. She never felt freer or more able to bloom until she met Cal. But then he was gone and she was alone, and she was still blooming or at least trying to. Yet she felt guilty for not being so lonely sometimes, and helpless when she was succumbed to those feelings as she was then.

“He would want you to be happy,” Arthur said.

“I wasn’t supposed to kill anyone. I never wanted that, but…I’d…I’d…”

Her hand was on his thigh. She squeezed, hard and desperate. She rasped “I’d do it again,” and he knew that was what scared her the most. It was what used to scar him the most about his father, and then himself.

He looked at Charlotte’s hand. In her grief and confusion, it wasn’t likely she thought about where her hand was. Not that she thought about it much when it was there earlier. He didn’t have much time to think of how he liked it right there, but he somehow did. He didn’t though so much like holding her as she wept. Not because he didn’t want to or he didn’t think she deserved it—she deserved a lot of things. But he wished their time together, what little of it they had—he didn’t want it to be filled with crying. He liked it better when they were outside in the sun, and he could see that thread of silver in her hair. Eating, talking, laughing. That was what he liked. Happy Charlotte. Happy Arthur, with happy Charlotte.

“Hey,” he said, rubbing her back, trying to stop her shivers. “Did I ever tell you about Copper?”

“Copper?” she asked, lifting her tear-stained face up. “Is that another horse?”

“No, my dog,” he replied, thinking he was going to get her somewhere happier. “He was always a puppy, even before he died. Used to jump into the bath with me. Ah, wish I’d brought the picture I have of him. I’d show you.”

“Can you draw him?”

“In the morning Charlotte. Go back to sleep.”

“What if I see it all again?”

Her wide brown eyes were wide like they were after she shot that man for him. He already damned himself for damning her. He was doing it all over again.

But she was going to be alright. She was brave. She was more than fear, more than whatever she was made to believe she was once, by that awful sounding mother of hers. A good woman who was too good to him.

He was going to be good to her.

He promised her, he’d stay. He would sit right on the chair beside her bed.

“It’s too small…”

“It’s fine,” Arthur lied, feeling tight in that rocking chair. Yet she wasn’t budging.

“Go on,” he said. He was going to stay. He wanted to stay.

“I’m not in the habit of having people watch me fall asleep,” she muttered, playing with a long strand of hair.

“What if I tell you a story instead?”

Her dark hair fanned out on the pillow. She propped her head up on her hand, staring him down. Her nose was red but her eyes were dry for the time being.

“I can’t sleep now, that won’t work,” she replied.

“Neither can I,” he admitted.

“Let me draw you now then.”

Before he could protest, she was getting up and reaching for her journal and pencils from the bedside table. He tried to reason that the light was too dark, they should do it in daylight, but all too often, he himself drew in less than ideal lighting. She was afraid at first, she said, doodling the first few tentative strokes against the parchment, sitting at the edge of her bed. She could see him in her mind, but she worried she would never be able to commit him to the page. She saw him a certain way. She wanted to make sure she could capture that certain way.

“Ever heard of someone named Albert Mason?”

“No,” Charlotte said as she drew. “A friend of yours?”

“You could say that. I save his life, I help him with his photography sometimes. He says the same things about capturing the west before civilization takes over.”

She hoped civilization wouldn’t take over, she said. Chicago was worse than the wolves. Having that all over was less than ideal.

“It may become a reality.”

“Shame.”

“Well, our time is dying out.”

She peered from the paper, meeting his eyes. “But we’re not quite dead yet.”

He said earlier it would have been an honor to be drawn by her, and he meant it. He didn’t think of himself as fine art, but the way Charlotte studied him, carefully taking every piece of him to commit to paper, he felt maybe not real nice or handsome, but real. He lived and he mattered to her. Maybe that was all anyone ever needed.

An hour passed of her careful glances, her practiced strokes. He thought it would be hard to not move so much, but he managed. She made it easy, even if his legs were too long for the chair, and his behind a bit too wide for the back. Then she was done, but she didn’t want to show him at first, as she held the book close to her chest. He wouldn’t pry, but she did show him eventually. He took the book in his too big hands, looked at how the candlelight illuminated him. She did good to him. She did real good.

“Do you think it looks like you?” she asked. “I wish I had more skill to get it right.”

He thought he must have blushed. “You did good Charlotte.”

It didn’t matter how he thought he looked, everyone looked different in their head than they really appeared. But he liked the way Charlotte saw him. And when she fell asleep soon after, dreamless and peaceful, he liked the way she looked too. Different from earlier when they laughed in the sun, more childlike, and not as older as she was when filled with grief. He felt imbued to a private, tender moment, so much so that maybe he should have left.

But he was a great, great fool. He stayed. And for her, he drew a picture of Copper.


	9. Chapter 9

Charlotte Clementina Vale Balfour was a dreamer, though not typically in her sleeping life. She dreamed when awake of different lives and things to paint, things all above her own skill. For her, dreaming at night was not typical, but when it occurred the images were blurred symbolled. She never searched for hidden meanings.

She didn’t have to that night. That night with Arthur in her home, she saw Cal and she saw him wheezing for breath and her pale hands covered in his blood, and Cal and that awful, evil man. She saw Arthur help her off the ground. He cleaned her stained and bloody hands. Her tears when she awoke were in remembrance of what happened and how she would do it again. How no one would help her through this when he was gone. It was all her.

He came. She saw him not in a dream, but in her waking life. She had been seeing him. She saw him so well she showed him how she saw him through her drawing. Not too bad, if she could allow herself a little bit of pride. Then again, that was what she thought last night before falling asleep. Morning with its clarity, sun bringing out the disillusionment of moon could change things.

She woke with that remembrance, that remembrance turning to sweet present when she saw him asleep and slumped in that too small chair. She grinned. No man besides her husband had ever slept with her, and while perhaps they did not share the same bed, there was quiet intimacy in slumbering together in the same space.

Intimacy. Such a word. Such a word that held so many different meanings beyond the typical. Before her wedding night her mother informed her of her wifely duties, as if Charlotte hadn’t found a way to read the salacious novels she shouldn’t have been reading before meeting Cal. Intimacy was a duty in her mother’s eye, necessary but base and passionless. Yes, her father was certainly the type to make it that way. But it was never, never that way for her and Cal. The first time, both of their first times, he was gentle. He made her more aware of her body and herself and her soul when he helped her out of her corset and onto their marriage bed. A touch of the hand was never just a touch of the hand. It was a weighted moment done a thousand times to a thousand other lovers that were both so different yet at the same time just like the two of them, but it was with Cal. That made it everything. She thought it ironic how she had been conditioned through her mother and their upbringing that the morning consisted of putting on pantaloons, chemises, corsets and then hoops, petticoats and then finally the dress that confined and constricted. So many layers to hide the body and make a new presence for oneself. Cal took away every single one of those layers and she was only Charlotte. She was never afraid to be just Charlotte with him. Nothing on her body was shameful. It was all Charlotte and Cal, who loved. It couldn’t be. Charlotte’s hands that touched Cal’s face, Charlotte’s hips that pressed against his, Charlotte’s legs that wrapped around Cal’s waist, pressing them deeper…

Then, there was a new type of intimacy to be learned. It was the intimacy of the soft morning kisses, breakfast together. Reading at night and sharing what they had head. Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, all teachers and philosophers and their own to ponder. Buying her a chocolate bar, because he remembered the story of how Livy the cook used to give her chocolate bars. Holding her and saying nothing, only swaying her along and stroking her hair as she wept about her father. The intimacy of the bedroom and love (never, never a “duty,” and she could never imagine how it could be with Cal. How wrong her mother was wrong.) may not have taken as long to learn, but Charlotte found joy in unexpected intimacy, new threads of love to the bigger tapestry of their togetherness.

In Charlotte and Arthur’s togetherness, they created something and discovered something each time. How could a man still hold sorrow in his sleep? Charlotte studied him in the golden early morning and realized Arthur Morgan did. He carried sorrow everywhere and all the time with only brief moments of reprieve. When he smiled with her, laughed, yes there was hardly any during those times, but it struck her that in that small reprieve that was supposed to be sleep, Arthur hardly had none. Less so than normal, but still some. Cruel.

Life was cruel to him in some respects. She wouldn’t be cruel to him then, she decided. She let him sleep, letting pass a silent prayer that his sleep would be as happy as hers was when he came to her room and comforted her. She could still feel his hands. He still smelled like sweat and sun and leather. His hand lingered against her hair. She squeezed his thigh. She had never done something like that before.

She brushed her hair in early morning light, casting a few quick glances at Arthur, still asleep. He held his face in one big hand, the other on his lap. One long leg was bent while the other was straight, feet bare like she had taken to of late. For her, it was an ode of sorts to being a little girl, wanting to kick up her skirts and run barefoot in the backyard and through the dirt. Men couldn’t often get away with bare feet as women could though. She had known one or two Chicago ladies take off their shoes during garden parties when the lift of the heel was too much. Scandalized many, including her mother, but a man to walk around barefoot? Unheard of. Cal’s bare foot against her bare leg…how that was a thread of unexpected intimacy. And Arthur, barefoot and sleeping on her chair was another thread, part of their unexpected intimacy.

She moved to the other room to change, in case he awoke to her bare back and legs. Her nightgown was hardly a thing a man should see a woman in unless he was married to her, and though that was already done for and the mystery of what Charlotte Balfour wore to sleep in was solved, she had enough decorum left to not want his eyes on her bareness. It was more so for him—he was a partly a chivalrous knight after all, would blush if he saw a lady unexpectedly that way, while she was a goddess of the moon. She forwent another pair of Cal’s trousers, at least for that day, and merely wore her old and practiced calico dress. No shoes. She made the bed, knowing he likely wouldn’t stay another night, but hoping he would anyway.

She checked on him once more when she was done. He was still asleep. His journal was on the floor, fallen from his lap sometime during the night. He drew her Copper. She stroked the penciled drawing as if it was really him, looking at it for a long moment before closing the journal and placing it on the bedside table. Copper. He looked a fine companion for a fine man, happy. That must have been how Arthur remembered him. It was a good remembrance.

She made them coffee. Her back was turned to him, pouring a cup for him as she heard the door open. When he emerged from the bedroom, she instinctively turned, offered a “good morning.” He was still stretching and nursing a creak in his neck from her uncomfortable chair, but grinned and nodded, offered a “good morning” back. She handed him a cup, and he thanked her again. She regarded their bare feet.

“Bare feet are nice, aren’t they?” she asked.

He regarded his, shrugging and admitting there was certain charm to it. She laughed. He laughed too. She told him she adored the picture.

“Oh, you saw that?” He sat down at the kitchen table, sipping the coffee Charlotte made him. “I could have probably done something better in broad daylight, but I worked with what I had.”

“He seemed a fine companion.”

“He was,” Arthur agreed, taking one last drink.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

It was no good, pointing out the things he didn’t have to do but did anyway. However, he remained bashful and ruffled his messy hair, before telling her he had to feed Peppermint. Charlotte realized Buell needed a feeding too.

The two went outside, though Arthur put his shoes on first. The two horses grazed nearby as Arthur pulled an apple from his knapsack, sticking his hand underneath and feeding Peppermint.

“Three times daily,” he instructed. “Sometimes more.”

“Sometimes?”

“Usually more,” he amended. “When she’s a good girl.” Which was often, he added with a laugh. “Apples, sugar cubes, oatcakes. Herbs too, and mushrooms. Berries. “Some grow nearby,” Charlotte said. “And blackberries not to far.”

“Next time I come, maybe we can go into town,” he said. “Get him some oatcakes. It would be a good idea to go to town anyway. You can pick up a few things.”

Something piqued in her. “Oh? Next time?”

Arthur didn’t say anything, but he gave Charlotte an apple. She stuck it under Buell’s nose, and though he slobbered all over her hand and she had to wipe the muck onto her dress, she patted him anyway. He was going to be a fine companion for her. Arthur suggested she ride him some more, or even just walk with him. He needed to bond with her.

“How does one bond with an animal?” Charlotte wondered aloud. It wasn’t though Buell could hold a conversation with her. That might have made him more ample and preferable company in some situations, but recalling Cal, she and he could talk for hours. She and Arthur could talk for hours. That didn’t mean their silences weren’t meaningful, but what of Buell? What of Copper too, or Peppermint? How else did one bond with an animal?

“Like anyone else, I suppose,” Arthur said.

“You have to forgive me,” she asked of him. “I never had a pet before. Mrs. Danvers—one of my mother’s friends—had a Siamese cat named Jemima, but she scratched me when I was alone with her once and tried to pet her.” By God Mrs. Danvers was awful and scratched Charlotte with her words, how she had a “Roman nose,” and a face that was all “jaw and sharp angled cheeks.” It was probably why the cat was so unbearable as well. Jemima picked up her owner’s delightful temperament.

“Never had much luck with cats,” Arthur admitted. “Maybe I’ve never met one that liked me. Hell, some horses ain’t never liked me. Dutch’s horse, the Count, he bucks anyone off who isn’t Dutch.”

You learn a language with your companion animal, Arthur however explained. In lieu of words it was looks and reassuring pats, the way you rear them and work with them. There also had to be a respect there with you and the animal. Horses especially. They carried you when they didn’t have to.

“You think about that,” Charlotte noted, oddly touched that he would think himself only as good as his horse.

“Yeah,” he muttered, gently circling and stroking Peppermint’s back. “I guess I think about that.”

“Happy is the horse, that bears the way of Arthur.”

His brows furrowed, and she explained the quote, from _Antony and Cleopatra._

Happy is the horse that bears the weight of Antony, Cleopatra said while Antony was away, and she was musing and dreaming of him. Arthur didn’t do much reading of Shakespeare, but he was still impressed Charlotte could remember such quotes. He hardly remembered any quotes, even the ones he liked.

“We remember in different ways,” she said. “I can recall quotes I like. You can draw from memory.”

“Not very good.”

“It’s not true,” she insisted. His self-deprecation was nothing new, but she had seen his talents, seen him. He shouldn’t have felt that way.

“You’re wonderful,” she continued. “You drew Copper and I saw a bit about what he was like. You saw me, and I saw myself when you showed me. Arthur. No one has ever done that before.”

She would not take his hand, though she began to, hesitated for a moment after. She was glad he didn’t see, looking wistfully somewhere far off in the distance instead. How she wanted to take his hand, create a new thread of intimacy with him. It wouldn’t be one as bold as their intimacy of the previous night, but just as instrumental to the tapestry as a whole. She wanted him to see the man that she saw and that she depicted.

“Ride Buell often, take him out,” Arthur advised, and how Charlotte fell. “He’ll be good to you.”

“You’ve been good to me.”

Damn, damn, damn it all. She took his hand. His eyes were sky and sea and sorrow and one moment above all others.

“Arthur,” she muttered, damning it further and squeezing his hand. “Thank you. For yesterday, for the times before, and for last night. I don’t think anyone else would have done that. You’ve been good to me.

Real good. And—”

She was overwhelmed by his eyes that held one moment above all others. She looked at his boots and her bare feet, reluctantly removed her hands from his and suggested they sit down. It was a long while of the two of them, just sitting down on her front steps. Her skirt fanned out and Arthur’s knee touched hers, but she wouldn’t move away. It wasn’t right for a woman to be alone, her mother always said. It wasn’t so bad to be alone, no, and live in that world all her own. But to awaken with him in early dawn, to have him by her side…

She said it first because it would hurt more for him to say that he had to go. She asked him, will you go today, and he nodded solemnly. He promised he would try to come back. If he did not, she would not die.

But would she live? In a way, yes. But that part of her that found a small heaven in a place that could be both heaven and hell would.

“I’m not worried about anyone else coming, trying to attack,” Charlotte said.

“I’m—”

She shook her head, touched his knee. At first such a touch would have been so scandalous and unheard of. She never even touched Cal’s leg that deliberately. It was only in the bedroom that she touched him there, when hers were wrapped around his. She would have never thought such a thing would become such simple yet easy intimacy.

“No,” she said, begging him. “Please don’t apologize for that again. I told you. I would do it all again.”

“I—”

“Don’t you dare say I shouldn’t have. It made me stronger. And I saved you. I saved you.”

She would have saved him a thousand times if she had to, and a thousand more. He didn’t believe it. He sat with his hands clasped and she put her hand on his broad, strong back.

“You matter to me,” she whispered.

She wasn’t afraid of another bad man. She had the means to protect herself. Come nightmares if they came. She could conjure his image when he was gone, to wake with her in the early dawn. She would envision him drawing Copper. She wasn’t afraid he wouldn’t come back. He would come back.

She was afraid of what would happen when he would leave—where he would go, what he would see without her. She almost asked him to take her with him. She didn’t of course, not as he packed up, thanked her again and again. He didn’t stay for lunch. He didn’t want to intrude anymore. He was never intruder.

She waited to see him off. He readied Peppermint. He didn’t mount immediacy. Instead, he waited for her.

“Be well,” she bade.

“I’ll be back.”

She inched closer, and that was when he was going to admit it—that he mattered to her too. It made her heart race when he did admit it in his honey and leather voice, yet it also made her sad, because he was a sad man. And what was she, but his sweetest sorrow?

Parting was such sweet sorrow. Parting was her sweetest sorrow.

She kissed his cheek. A kiss, a hand falling to the spot, treasuring it. A kiss, and he was gone.

She wasn’t gone. She remained. She hunted that day with Buell, not needing the gun for anything other than hunting. She came back home, ate alone. And when she opened her journal, she found, that right next that drawing of him, he left another drawing of Cooper


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey friends, hope you're still enjoying! :)

Even when he was away during that gap of time, Arthur inspired Charlotte.

The first stir of inspiration occurred when he taught her how to hunt and survive, and he continued to inspire by coming back and assuring her she could build a life of her own in her own private heaven once meant for an Adam and Eve of another name. He gave her a new friend and companion that could carry her if she wielded him right, and a drawing of a fallen friend in her journal. He inspired her to venture out with Buell, wearing Cal’s pants and suspenders and taking a pencil and journal with her. He inspired her to draw more, depict him again so she may show him again, and gain better skill so she could accurately portray the subtle changes of his appearance. She wanted to leave drawings in his journal when he came back to her.

Buell however, was not cooperating as her artistic muse was cooperating. Not at first.

It was partly her fault. No horse wanted a rider who wasn’t confident, and her insecurity without Arthur by her side showed. At first she only trotted with Buell, took him by the reins and walked, but eventually she found it in her to rise and mount him. With no Arthur she was skittish and nervous. She was convinced she was going to sway too far to the right and fall, then she was convinced she was going to sway too far to the left and fall. Either that or she wouldn’t be able to get herself down, and she would be doomed to ride atop Buell until he tired of her weight and inability to properly ride him and bucked her off unceremoniously on the ground where she would sink back into the earth.

Arthur was right when he said animals could sense things. Buell did not cooperate when Charlotte tried to ride him because something in his being sensed she was nervous, not attuned to him. She couldn’t guide him to her usual hunting spot if she tried to ride him, he would only follow if she led by the reins. He missed his true owner and he only tolerated Charlotte, she knew that. This went on for two days, until Charlotte emerged from her hut and offered him a sugar cube Arthur gave her. After Buell gobbled up the thing she wiped the slobber off on Cal’s pants, and began to stroke his long face.

“I know you miss him,” she said. “Ah…what was his name? Hamish maybe? Either way, he must have been a fine man. Perhaps I’m not so fine a lady, but I think we could be great friends. Right? Won’t you be friends with me?”

She closed her eyes as she continued to stroke his mane, trying to imbue in herself that yes she could. She was a survivor, and so was he. They were meant to be friends.

With one swift motion, she was on him. She took a moment to adjust, patted him like she saw Arthur pat his horse Peppermint. It was a laden with a silent thanks for him, because after all, he didn’t have to carry her. But he did, and they learned to ride together. They rode and perhaps she was no jockey, but with time and practice, she could be somewhat of a horsewoman. She could be Buell’s friend.

As the days wore on, she managed to ride Buell to her preferred hunting spot. She went even when she didn’t need to hunt, went to observe and feel not so isolated in her little cabin. Buell grazed as she drew and hunted, and sometimes she talked to him. While she did enjoy venison, she said, she found the sounds they made if the kill wasn’t clean nearly unbearable, and lived mainly off of rabbits and blackberries because of it. She also supposed, she regaled to her horse, it was also because she didn’t feel so sorry for rabbits, as there were many of them, but upon observing a quiet doe and her fauns, she couldn’t bring herself to let the little ones fend for herself. In that gap of time since Arthur left she killed no deer—drew the family of the small fauns and doe instead, wondering where the father was. She drew a squirrel, drew the trees, drew Buell, and when she tried to draw Cal a tear stained the page and she wouldn’t any longer. At home, she even tried to draw herself. She fared better with that than Cal, but she was drawing the younger version of herself, not even the older version that met Cal, but little girl Charlotte. She was going to one day draw Charlotte the plainswoman, the survivor.

The hobby managed to occupy her and keep her mind off of Arthur’s adventures, and possible wrongdoings. It crept in her mind one night as she tried to sleep…her man was likely not what one called an upstanding citizen in the traditional sense, but he was to her. He was her friend. And though he didn’t come to her promptly, it wasn’t that she expected him to, nor did she weep when she counted that thirtieth day and he had not arrived by nightfall, but she had grown accustomed to him and learned to derive happiness from talking with him. He made it so easy. They hadn’t spent that much time together, she knew, but she didn’t think it was so much about how much time had passed together, but how that time was spent. She hoped that somewhere far off, wherever he was, he was hoping to make the time longer. But of course, he had people to take care of, his own life separate from her. He couldn’t always be at her private paradise, the Adam but not Adam to her Eve, if she could even dare call what they had that.  
She was lost for metaphors however. It would have to do.

It wasn’t so bad to live alone, to try to thrive in a world that was all your own. It was Charlotte’s chant and prayer as she sunk into her mind and found how vibrant it could be. She even thought she managed to transfer some of that to paper. And in truth, she wasn’t all alone. She found Buell quite enjoyed her talk of Chicago high society and the different drawings she would attempt each day. He didn’t speak, of course he didn’t, but hidden in his sad eyes that missed Hamish still, she found her friend. She wasn’t really alone. And the world, it couldn’t possibly be only hers. It was the animals, the earth’s. Somewhere too, it was also Arthur’s.

But on the thirty second day without him, she came home to find that she and Buell weren’t really alone, not even in the spiritual sense.

Her brother had found her.

 

* * *

 

 

Charlotte’s younger brother of five years, Alexander Josiah Vale, resembled the old photographs of their father before he met their mother. Like their father Josiah, Alexander was ebony-haired, parted in the middle, with that sharp, pointed jaw and prominent nose that none of the Vales escaped from, but Alexander pulled off better. At least according to their mother anyway. Photographs in sepia however did not do right to depict Alexander’s brown eyes that were either russet or coffee-like depending on the lighting. Unlike their father, Alexander had kinder eyes.

When he ran to Charlotte, he held her face in his hands for several long moments before wrapping his arms around her and swaying her back and forth, chanting, “you’re alright, you’re alright.” So bewildered was she—Alexander was not fond of touch, he never reciprocated her embraces when they were children—that she swayed awkwardly with him for a few moments before finally dropping Buell’s reins and returning the embrace tightly.

“Alex,” she said, swayed by his unexpected tenderness. “You found me. You’re here”

“I found you, yes, yes, I found you.” He scooped her face upward once more, as if to check to make sure she was no changeling. He used to believe in those sorts of stories when he was a small boy, before their father uprooted him from any childhood games and sent him off to boarding school to one day join Chicago’s elite. When he came back and started banking like their father, Charlotte wouldn’t have blamed a single person if they started to believe Alex was the older one, the way he offered unsolicited advice about the proper gentleman that she should accept offers to dance from. Cal certainly wasn’t one of those people at first. Alex knew him from school. He may have been a few years ahead, but he had a reputation. He was too quiet, too mysterious. Always had his head buried in a book.

“I wouldn’t if I were you Charlotte Clementina,” Alexander advised at the Palmer House that day she met Cal, his tall form draped against the bar, sipping his cognac and using both her first and middle name in another attempt to establish his feigned superiority. “They say quiet men that read cause trouble.”

“If that’s the way it is,” Charlotte replied, taking off her glove, “Quiet women that read cause disasters.”

And then she approached her future husband, and both she and Alexander learned Cal was only quiet with those who were not within his circle. He wasn’t so quiet anymore to Alex, as gradually her brother turned into one of his friends. They didn’t go into the banking business together as Alex suggested once, but they were friends enough for Alex to hold Charlotte tightly and offer a thousand condolences. He saw the grave, he said. The flowers had withered, and he had had picked some fresher wildflowers nearby and placed them on the grave. He had heard of Cal’s passing of course—the letter that Charlotte wrote to Cal’s mother got passed to their mother. This was naturally passed to Alexander, who was in Saint Dennis, doing some business for the bank and a man named Angelo Bronte.

“I’ve come to take you home Charlotte,” he said. “I’ll help you pack your things in the carriage.”

She saw the carriage when she arrived. It was a gaudy, unnecessary display of wealth in her opinion. (Who needed something so extravagant for travel?) She wasn’t going to pack a single one of her belongings in that awful thing.

“Alexander.”

“Hush, you’re tired,” he said, wrapping an arm around her and trying to bring her back into the house. “My poor girl. You have a silver premature streak in your hair from all this. I’ll make you some coffee, and then we can be off as soon as tomorrow. I need to be back in Saint Dennis soon, but Angelo will understand. He cares so much about the family you know, and Mother is worried sick. All she wants is—”

“Alexander Vale, you are not taking me back to Chicago.”

Her tone was one he did not expect, so much he removed his arm from around her shoulder and wore the look of a man who deemed himself so self-important that he couldn’t dare believe the woman he had fixated on didn’t want his affection. Alexander was far better than that.

She straightened. “Alexander Vale,” she said, looking directly in his eyes. “I am not going back to Chicago. I am going to fulfill the promise Cal and I made and stay here where I belong.”

He was silent. He turned pale.

“Alexander? Do you hear me?”

His eyes widened. “Great balls of fire,” he muttered, looking at her up and down, seeing not little girl Charlotte, but survivor Charlotte.

“You’re wearing pants,” he stated. “You’re his pants. You’re wearing suspenders…You—”

“Oh I still wear dresses and skirts too,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Try the calico dress on later. You’d look smashing in it.”

“Charlotte…you have a horse.”

“Indeed,” she said, walking closer to Buell, stroking him fondly. “I’m surprised you just noticed him. Please, meet Buell.”

“How long have you been here on your own?”

“A while,” she replied.

“You’ve survived.”

“No,” she replied. “I’m better.”

 

* * *

 

 

She made him coffee and brought him some stew. “Eat it, would you,” she told him when instead he opted not to eat or drink, but rather stare blankly around Charlotte’s home and little paradise.

“The stew is good and well-seasoned with thyme,” Charlotte said. “You would like it.”

“I…how?” he finally asked, obeying her and tasting the stew. His eyes widened, pleasantly surprised at Charlotte’s skill. Though he needn’t have been too surprised. Lavinia the cook was always her closest confident. Naturally she would pick up a few things.

Alexander ate as she told her story, step by step. She told him of a man who helped her, had become her friend. She omitted the part with the Murfree brood, and omitted the part where Arthur stayed overnight, and didn’t dare mention Arthur’s status, but otherwise she told a truthful tale.

“You sound like Arthur means a great deal to you,” Alexander mentioned, more casually than conspiratorially, though Charlotte knew the layer beneath his mercurial eyes.

“He’s a friend who helped me. He taught me how to shoot.”

“A woman shooting. What is the world coming to?

She rolled her eyes. “I had no choice Alexander. I had to eat and I had to survive. One cannot live off of berries. And I’ll have you mention I am both a woman and your older sister, and you do well to respect me.”

“Dear, sweet sister. I do respect you,” Alexander said, insulted so she would dare insist he wasn’t. “When Mother told me what happened I volunteered to come and pick you up myself.”

“That will not be necessary.”

“Charlotte—”

“I’m happy. I’m staying.” And she folded her arms and crossed her legs.

“You don’t seem happy,” he pointed out.

“Because you’re making me angry. Usually I am quite happy.”

“Is it because of this Arthur person? Charlotte. I will not be telling mother that you let a man in your house.”

“Men, women, we’re all survivors here. And get father’s old and outdated ideas out of your head as well,” she demanded. “I swear. You’ll marry a woman of the twentieth century and try to bring her back to the previous. It’s a dawn of a new era for us—everyone. I’m proof that we can survive, we can provide for ourselves.”

“Oh God, next you’ll be one of those silly suffragettes.”

“I was always a silly suffragette. Stick that up your pipe and smoke it.”

He didn’t reply, but sipped his coffee and ate the stew she made him. She had always appreciated the steadfastness of Arthur Morgan, but the faults of her brother turned that appreciation into ardent adoration. Arthur may have known she was a woman and viewed her as such, but never did he scoff at teaching her to shoot, or laugh at her first feeble attempts and deem her over her head when she said she would stay and do what she and Cal promised they would do. He believed in her. Alexander may have seen it, seen her alive and thriving and stomping her foot down, but he was not connecting the lines that were once little girl Charlotte to the Charlotte before him who was a survivor. Who knows if he ever would. She told Cal once she hoped he would not inherit their father’s latent feelings of superiority to the opposite sex, just as Charlotte never inherited her mother’s silent yielding.

Wars however, were not won immediately, or in the matter of days. At the very least, she could see as he nodded and leaned back in his chair contemplatively and thoughtfully, that he was conceding. For now.  
He did however, inform her that she was going to have to personally tell their father the very important detail that she had every intention of staying in her home.

“I’m not going back to Chicago,” she stated flatly. “I’ll let him and Mother know through a letter, but I will not go to Chicago.”

“You don’t have to,” Alexander replied. “Meet him in Saint Dennis.”

He was also going to meet Angelo Bronte, Alexander said. Charlotte cared not who this person was—some self-important businessman she had no intention of meeting. “I’m not going to that foul and vulgar city,” she informed her brother.

It wasn’t foul or vulgar, Alexander said. Besides, how would Charlotte even know? She had yet to be there. Perhaps she would like it. She wasn’t so convinced about the suggestions—from what she heard the city seemed too rooted in the past. If she walked around the city in Cal’s work trousers, high society would likely faint at the sight of her. Chicago High Society certainly would. But southern High Society was what her mother was from, and Charlotte knew it to be far worse.

There was another matter as well. She didn’t want Arthur to come back and see she wasn’t there.

He promised he would be back. He was a man of his promises.

“Charlotte—”

“I can’t go to the city Alexander.”

Alexander wasn’t budging. “Father will come here if I don’t bring you back.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“He does care,” Alex insisted. “He would.”

She shook her head. “It’s not that he cares. He thinks he can control me. But not he or anyone else will inform me where I should go and where I should not go, where I should stay and where I should move back to.”

No, not little girl Charlotte. Would be controlled. Certainly not woman Charlotte, survivor Charlotte, who had more scars on her hands from more than needlework. She held a gun. She hunted her own food, fished. She killed for a man she cared for.

She could do so much more than face her father.

“I’ll go to Saint Dennis and face him,” Charlotte said. “I’ll go with you.”

“Excellent. I’m sure you would be welcome at the mayor’s house—that’s where we’re going to meet. Must get you a dress though—can’t walk into Saint Dennis with those trousers on. But oh...the stories of it all, your experiences here. A widow, surviving all on her own…”

“Alexander?”

He blinked. “Why do you look so serious?”

“Because my experiences are not some story you can tell at a party. They are real. They are mine and they matter. I am proof you can survive. And also, Alexander…”

She leaned in. “Never tell me what I should wear again.”

It was another won battle in the small evening of the day.

 

* * *

 

 

She left a note for Arthur before she took Buell and left with Alexander and his gaudy carriage. _Dear Arthur,_ it said. _Don’t be alarmed. I’m in Saint Dennis. What is mine is yours, please stay if you will. Wait for me_

She crossed out _wait for me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! If you feel so inclined, leave a comment! comments give me water in the sahara desert :)


	11. Chapter 11

It was the early afternoon by Shady Belle, and Arthur Morgan stood both by the water’s edge and at a precipice. It was the same precipice as Dutch, and Hosea—all of them robbers and thieves, gunslingers and outlaws. He didn’t wish to be there, to watch a world of expanding civilization that would neither want nor welcome him shut him away until they were all more myth than men. Yet at the same time, there was a part of him that wondered if perhaps it was for the best, perhaps it was better to be more myth than man.

What were they anyway, but a group of poor unfortunate souls who had gotten wrapped into that life, one way or another, whether it chose them itself or they just fell into it. They clung to the past like a drowning man tried to find air, not wanting to believe that soon cities like Saint Denis would sprawl across America. They would drown. And who would remember them? No one, save that one other poor unfortunate soul who found his journal years and years later. Bad men, they would think. I am bad, but they were far worse. And yet though they were bad, they still cared. They still lost. They still loved.

He loved that wretch of a boy.

It took Arthur losing him to understand his comradery and banter with Sean was more than idle talk to pass the time. “Stop frownin’ English,” Sean would say as they rode the stagecoach back to the Emerald Ranch, Arthur suggesting Sean donating some money in the camp funds would make the frowning stop. Sean possessed a good nature, better than most of them. He knew how to laugh, wasn’t afraid of giving someone else a smile, but knew he could do better. Once, he asked Arthur once what he should do about Karen. Arthur didn’t even remember what advice he gave, or if it was even good. All he knew was he lost, and she lost, and she had fallen harder to the bottle. All of them were lost. They couldn’t help her.

They couldn’t even mourn all that well either, not really. After escaping the heist in Rhodes, and oh, how that day would forever burn in his mind, every god damn step he took. It was a week after coming back from up north. He was thinking of that small bed Charlotte had, and how it was more comfortable than he gave it credit for, Buell slobbering on her hand, and the way the white thread in her hair looked more silver in the sun. He could even still feel that kiss like an ember against his cheek. Dutch came up to him as he sat by the fire. Bill, Micah and Sean were waiting for him in Rhodes. Arthur knew immediately something wasn’t right. Why didn’t they know it to? Why did it take Sean laying in the street, blood pooling against the gravel for the rest to wake up?

Why did it have to be Sean?

He heard the soft heeled footsteps approach before Mary Beth announced Pearson finished the stew if he wanted someone. Arthur closed his journal, more habit than anything—he didn’t usually like people to see what he wrote or sketched, but he’d rather it be Mary Beth than anyone. She was one of the most thoughtful. He stretched and he thanked her for letting him know, but he wasn’t sure if he was hungry.

“I didn’t see you eat breakfast,” she mentioned. “Come on Arthur. You should eat.”

“Really. Ain’t much hungry.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve taken this hard is what it is.”

She was right, ain’t no point in lying. He nodded, conceding. He may have went off for a while after the incident in Rhodes, almost made Peppermint work too hard, that he was still surprised she didn’t try to buck him off in that time after Sean’s death. He was gone for two days and he didn’t realize he was taking the path back to Charlotte until Charles found him, told him about Jack, and asked where he planned on going. “A friend,” he replied. “I was going to see a friend.” He hadn’t seen his friend since. But the matter was, he did himself the disservice of thinking Sean was less than what he really was, and it hit him too hard when he died. He needed more time, but Jack was captured, and he had none. He was always very good at not thinking of things and processing things as more things happened.

They had Jack back. The celebrated the night previous, but all Arthur could remember was how Dutch claimed, “I can’t even think about Sean now” as the horses thundered them out of Clemens Point to the Braithwaite Manor. Arthur wondered if he thought about Sean since, if any of them did, except for a few of them, and Karen.

Karen. Poor, poor Karen.

“Yeah,” Arthur said to Mary Beth. “I’ve taken this hard.”

“Want to talk about it?”

It wasn’t no spot to do that, he insisted, pointing to the green water. Mary Beth only laughed.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think the swamps are lovely this time of year.”

“Well, to each their own.” At least though, it wasn’t Saint Denis. Cities were the people, Dutch said. They gave it their character. He may have run into interesting individuals in single, solitary moments, but Saint Denis took on the persona of a collective soul, one that was thoroughly money hungry, pompous, and vile. If the future was nothing but an even vaster Saint Denis, he wanted no part of it, hoped he would never meet that one collective person that took on the entire persona of Saint Denis.

“Been here, journaling all day,” Mary Beth said. “Been out here early too. Saw you this morning.”

“It’s cooler when it’s early,” he said, before apologizing for turning down her offer to dance when she asked last night.

“Ah, no trouble,” she replied, eyeing the journal at his hip. “So what are you writing about anyway?”

“Just everything,” he admitted. “And what about you?”

Oh, he saw her that morning, scribbling away underneath her flapped tent. She blushed, replying “nothing.”

“That’s a lot of writing for nothing.”

“Oh Arthur, you…”

He chuckled. “Hey, dominoes later?” he asked. “Whoever wins can read the other’s journal.”

“Oh you’re on. Maybe. We’ll see.”

He chuckled some more, broken up by a cough. She asked if he was alright and he replied it must have been because he hadn’t laughed in a while, and it was a bit foreign after so long. But it was good to laugh again, have a banter again, even if it was only a little, as the kindness only extended because Miss Grimshaw likely asked her to bring him back to the main camp for lunch. He served his messenger as well as Miss Grimshaw and Tilly, as both hadn’t eaten yet, serving himself last, and finding he did have more appetite than he thought. The three called him “gentleman,” and a dashing prince in disguise, chivalrous for offering to serve them, and he recalled how the stew tasted of thyme today, like Charlotte’s. She called him chivalrous too.

“Arthur Morgan, I have a problem.”

He didn’t like Miss Grimshaw’s tone. He knew that tone. “What problem is that ma’am?”

She reached over, touched the wisps of hair that had begun to fall a little past his chin. He flinched, and she slapped his cheek enough to sting slightly. She informed him he needed a haircut, and a clean shave.

“Ah, what’s wrong with my hair or beard?” he asked, hand defensively flying to his whiskers.

“You look like you’ve been living in the woods!”

“We all have,” Mary Beth pointed out. “Besides, I kind of like your hair Arthur. It suits you. You and Charles and John can pull it off well.”

“You sir have a party to attend soon,” Miss Grimshaw reminded him before he could thank her. “If you so much as entertain the notion of walking into the mayor’s house with your hair as long as it is—”

“Well, Miss Grimshaw, I like it too,” Tilly said. “Arthur at least knows what a comb is. Unlike some.”

Tilly’s eyes drifted toward Micah’s tent. Miss Grimshaw was the only one of the four at the table that didn’t laugh. He thanked his defenders, Tilly and Mary Beth, but upon toying with the strands at the back of his hair, he became more aware of how long it had gotten. Since Sean’s death and since they had scoured the streets looking for Angelo Bronte and Jack, what little he cared about his appearance went to the wayside. Mary used to comment if his hair or beard got to long—or used to, anyway. She said she always knew hair or whiskers that were slightly longer than normal signified a contemplative Arthur, a far-off Arthur. Come back, she used to say. He liked it best when she said it underneath him, arms coiled around him. Come back to me. She didn’t say that any longer.

He also had been neglecting bathing, something Miss Grimshaw pointed out. The dirt underneath his fingernails was “barbaric” and he was going to smell as bad as Micah if he went it go on longer. Mary Beth pointed out Miss Grimshaw’s hypocrisy as Tilly leaned in. Her scrunched nose let him know all he needed to know.

“Now Arthur, if you could be so kind to get that lye soap, and wash,” Miss Grimshaw ordered. “Or I promise you I will—”

“No need ma’am,” Arthur promised her, rising from the table, surrendering. He had been subjected to her merciless hands and nails enough times in his youth, he was surprised his scalp didn’t have any permanent marks from all the times she escorted him to a river or barrel of water to get the grime and dirt off. He promised he would head straight to Saint Denis, wash at the hotel, and have a haircut.

“Very good,” Miss Grimshaw said. “Oh, and Arthur—”

“I promise,” he said, “I’ll try to bring Karen back.”

Susan, Mary Beth, Tilly were the ones that kept watch over Karen, though none of them could sway her away from the drink. When they first made camp at Shady Belle, Arthur saw Mary Beth ask Karen if she wanted to go by Sean’s grave. It was by their old camp, a lovely spot near the water, exactly where Sean would want to be. Charles even made a cross for him, and maybe they could go there say a few words. Arthur, watching, came by and said he’d be willing to join them. Karen refused, but took another whiskey. Dutch should have made them all go now that Jack was back. He brushed it aside instead. It had been weeks, Dutch said, dismissive when Miss Grimshaw suggested it that early morning. They had work to do. There was no time for mourning. So the gang had to do it privately, or not at all. And Karen, who perhaps needed the time more than any of them…

Well. Only Susan, Mary Beth, Tilly and he were aware of that at all. Susan called him good, proper when he promised he would get her home. Tilly patted his back. Mary Beth smiled sadly, going back to her journal. He wasn’t good nor proper. He was just worried.

He made good time to Saint Denis. Karen wasn’t there at the hotel, but he knew it was where she would stay. She typically wore airs when she could get away with it, liked to indulge in luxury when she could. He bathed, declining any help, not wishing for the looks that would pass his way when the water turned from clear blue to a dull blackish grey. He put back on his typical blues, accented with ascot, but reframed from his hat, carrying at his side instead and planning on sticking it back in his saddle bag. He really did need a trim. Maybe Miss Grimshaw was right and he did look like some sort of man from the mountains.

As he walked down from the washroom, the pianist played one of those songs by some fellow named Joplin or other. He wouldn’t have known had the pianist not made the announcement beforehand, though Arthur found he liked the melody. But that may have been because he was unfamiliar with most things, and all art was a novelty of sorts to him. What it was like to be like Charlotte Vale Balfour, always surrounded by art in Chicago, making her own to entertain hours of boredom, to save herself, he didn’t know. What few books he had read, few art he did know, they all mattered to him.

Curiously he was swept away for a few more moments by the music, standing by the bar. He took a beer. He tapped his foot for a few beats, sipped the drink before a dark haired, young looking fellow at the poker table caught his eye. He wore an expensive looking suit with cravat, bowler hat, and slapped his hand down on the table when another gentleman won the round.

“You cheated,” he accused, though they all assured it was just skill—skills his sister could teach him if he listened.

“Oh I quit!” he exclaimed, swinging from his seat to the bar near Arthur, demanding a whiskey. “Alexander,” the others at the table called, “come back, you’ll win it back!”

“I wouldn’t my friend,” Arthur suggested. “That never works.”

The fellow, Alexander, shook his head. “Beaten by my own sister, now this.”

In his experience, women didn’t typically play poker. His curiosity, piquing originally when they first mentioned it, grew further.

“Sister?” Arthur asked.

“Oh yes,” the fellow—Alexander replied. “Charlotte apparently thinks she’s a real ‘plainswoman,’ now, what with living by herself, hunting…teaching me the proper way to care for a horse. She’s probably at the stables now, making sure they take good care of her ‘Buell.’ I swear, that woman and her…”

Arthur stared. He couldn’t believe it. “Wait. Did you say Charlotte? Buell?”

“Yes. Charlotte and her horse Buell. She—wait, where are you going?”

He didn’t have to look far to find her. Outside the hotel, standing near Peppermint, there she was.

There she was.

“Charlotte Balfour?”

She looked different. She was different. In Saint Denis she couldn’t be that “plainswoman,” he knew her to be, but distinguished Charlotte Balfour, a lady, Charlotte Balfour, though she was always a lady, and merely one of a different sort when they were alone. He was accustomed to her hair in a long braid, not pulled up in an elegant coiffure, and he liked her in her pants compared to a skirt, though she wore both well. Look at the two of them, he thought. They were both uprooted from home.

“Arthur,” Charlotte muttered, eyes wide, ungloved hands removing themselves from Peppermint’s mane. “I knew it was her, I knew you were here when I saw her. I’m—"

“Surprised? Me too.” He regarded his horse. “She likes you,” he said.

“I think she does.”

They smiled at each other. She told him his hair was different, and he replied she looked different herself, in her light blue skirt that bustled out, and her shirt of the same color with a high collar and long sleeves.

“I am different here,” she agreed. “But…”

She inched closer. They were a breath away, and he was very, very grateful he had taken that bath, not so grateful he didn’t cut his hair first.

“I suppose now I feel more like myself,” said Charlotte.

He couldn’t embrace her. Not as people passed by, and the language in the city was interpreted differently than the language of the plains and rural hills, were she had built her home and had survived, and where she welcomed him into her world. Instead, he took her small hand in his much larger, much more calloused one. Though, he noted, her hand wasn’t so soft itself. A sign of hunting and riding, surviving.

He liked her hand right there.

He kissed her hand, like he had heard the knights in the tales of old did. He felt more like himself too.

“It’s good to see you Arthur,” Charlotte muttered. “I would have never thought to see you here.”

“Never thought to be here so much either.”

“I saw her though,” she continued, motioning to Peppermint. “And…well. It was a good surprise. Not the only one.”

“Ah, well,” he let go of her hand, touched his too long hair. “Haven’t time lately.”

“I like it.”

She liked it, she said. Well. He wasn’t too sure about cutting it off anymore.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the wait, things got rough in my other fic, but here we are! <3

The fact of the matter was that the hair had to go. Arthur said if he walked back to camp with his hair still at the same length, Miss Grimshaw would get a pair of scissors and chop if off herself. Charlotte offered to keep him company to the barber, an offer he graciously took.

“Are you going to tell your brother you’re coming with me?” he asked as she walked with him to the shop.

“No,” Charlotte replied, pointing out they had already begun to walk there anyway.

She was right, he noted. “Charming fellow,” he called him after Charlotte retold the story and explained why she was in Saint Denis.

“Oh yes, he and my father both." That meeting had been heavy on her mind, and her father wasn't even there yet. It was why she went to go see Buell. He calmed her down. Arthur eased her further.

“Think your father will respect your wishes?”

She caught his gaze. “I’ll make him," she said, winking and sticking a hand on her hip.

He chuckled. “That’s my girl.”

“And what about you?” she wondered, nearly there to the barber, heart doing an odd sort of leap at the phrase, that’s my girl, along with his amused laughter. “What brings my cowboy to the jewel of the South?”

It was no jewel, he thought, Charlotte having to agree. He also half grinned at her calling him “my” cowboy. What passed between them, Charlotte thought, wasn’t a sort of possession. _My girl, my cowboy,_ they weren’t used as a way to declare ownership, but express kinship. A fondness. He was more suited for the wild, the woods, and open fields. She was more suited in her own oasis. They found each other in the muck disguised as a jewel. Together, they could be themselves in land swarming with social climbers and pretenders. She would have drowned if she didn’t find him.

“Nothing good,” he replied.

He was remembering something he didn’t want to remember. “What do you mean?” she asked, though he refrained from answering, as they were almost to the barber. She came in with him to the garishly decorated place, stood by his side as he asked for a trim.

The barber asked Arthur to sit before wrapping a cloth around his neck. “Beard as well sir?”

“Sure.”

“And how would you like that done? Mustaches are very in.”

When Arthur didn’t say anything, trying to decide, Charlotte did. “No.”

The barber stared. “Well, please no,” she amended, not liking the way the barber’s stare suggested she had no right to have an opinion on the way a man should maintain hid appearance, even though she knew several men who had opinions on the way women dressed. “Full beard or no beard. No in between,” she said. “Please. With all due respect sir. That’s my opinion on the matter.”

The barber, who sported a very thick black mustache, raised his eyes at Charlotte, but otherwise checked with Arthur, making sure if that was what he wanted.

Their gazes met through the mirror. “I think you’d look good no matter what,” she said.

“Well.” His grin was crooked. “Glad you would think so. But as the lady wishes. Full beard, trimmed.”

“Oh yes yes,” the barber fussed, pulling out the scissors and shears, “I understand, anything the wife wants.”

Though Charlotte still wore her wedding band, Arthur had no ring. The fact could have been checked, but an assumption was made and neither Charlotte nor Arthur were going to correct the assumption. She hoped it didn’t bother him as she stood waiting, and once his hair was cut to the appropriate length and beard trimmed shorter though not too short, Arthur paid and the two escorted themselves out. She had an errand she wanted to run without Alexander, she said, and perhaps he could accompany her.

“As the lady wishes,” Arthur repeated, though he wondered what exactly the errand was.

“I want some new pants,” she replied, riding the high of a thrill for being called ‘lady’ again in his honey and leather voice.

“Ah.”

“For riding, and other matters. I could use Cal’s, but I want some of my own. By the way,” she stopped them, her skirt swishing around her legs. “Did it bother you that the barber thought you and I were…?” She linked them in an invisible bond with the swish of her hands.

He shook his head. “People don’t think men and women can be friends,” Arthur said, seeking an answer to the man’s assumptions.

Charlotte had a wonder. “Do you?”

He blinked, not expecting such a question. He answered though, replying that Mary Beth, Tilly, and the other women at camp were easier to talk to. He looked at her even. “You’re easy to talk to,” he said.

She stood just a little bit taller. “My mother once told me if I didn’t get my head out of the clouds and back to the earth, no one would ever find me palatable.”

“You proved your mother wrong.”

“If anything,” she began, biting back laughter. “Cal had his head in the clouds too. Why else would two mad individuals ever think to escape the city and make wine in the country even though they didn’t know the first thing about wilderness survival?”

“Maybe I have my head in the clouds too then.”

“If that’s the way things are, I am hlad to have you with me. It is quite a place to be.”

The two dolts with their heads in the clouds must have made quite the sight to see in the jewel of the south’s streets, walking side by side to the tailor’s. It took escaping the city and not having to don layers upon layers of overcoats and petticoats for Charlotte to understand how much of a costume every layer really was. It took much longer to dress that morning in her hotel room than it had been taking her at home, and that was even without a corset, something she decided against when she realized how lovely it was not feeling so constrained in breathing and sitting. The fact of the matter was she wanted more trousers, and ones that better fit her frame at that, as Cal had narrower hips than she. She was going to play the part of the dutiful, distinguished and well-dressed woman in the city, but the moment she was home where she belonged, it would be back to how things were before, and back in new pants that were made especially for her.

She didn’t know how the tailor would react to her suggestion, but she assumed it would be the same as Alexander’s—not well. “Are they for the gentleman?” the tailor, a certain Mr. Landers with silvery hair lined face with bright blue eyes asked when the bells overhead signaled her and Arthur’s entrance into the shop, and Charlotte expressed her desire.

“They’re for the lady,” Arthur said, hands on his belt.

Mr. Landers raised his eyebrows. “The lady?” He pushed his glasses down his nose. “But sir, ma’am…it’s not right for a woman to wear pants. Didn’t you read the papers? It’s said that if a woman wears pants, it could interfere with—”

“That’s no problem with me,” Charlotte assured, reading that very paper and laughing at such an outlandish suggestion that a woman wearing pants prevented pregnancy. “My husband and I tried for many years. I was told because it hasn’t happened yet, it likely never will. Oh, don’t give me that look. It’s alright. Please don’t pity me.”

He twiddled his thumbs in that way so many did when she admitted her childlessness. It used to not be so bad, but she was at the point where lines on her face told tales. That silver in her bangs wasn’t helping. She detested the pity that came in regards to certain things, knew enough from her own family that a man and wife’s happiness could not be derived— or saved— with children. She and Alexander were proof enough of that fact with her parents—she more so than Alexander. Alexander made them marginally better. It was always the girl that exacerbated things between an uneasy man and wife. Her life was never her own. The two had opposing views on where it should go.

No. Having a child was not always the necessary step for a man and a wife. It could not save, nor revive. She and Cal were happy without. They gave up trying. Hope always brought more disappointment.

“Well,” Mr. Landers said, straightening his jacket, “I did see a woman the other day ride through here with pants. Perhaps the matter isn’t too radical.”

Charlotte was about to agree, but Arthur spoke first. A name of “Sadie.” Mr. Landers blinked at him, asking who on earth that was. “Sadie. Sadie Adler,” Arthur clarified. “That’s who you saw with the trousers, I’d imagine. Few women in the world wear pants, save for my wife here, and Sadie Adler. Good woman. One of the best, along with my wife here. Oh, and did I mention she was my wife?”

He said “wife” far too many times for a sharp individual to believe, but Mr. Landers had his smarts in clothes and not social graces it seemed. As for Charlotte, the ruse and game Arthur played along with made it difficult for her to keep a straight face. She was glad to be called his, even in a realm of pretend and make believe.

Mr. Landers fit Charlotte for her own pair of work trousers, fit for riding and other matters. She spun a yarn that was half true about buying a plot of land and beginning a life of country living, informing him as she turned and he took measurements of her legs and hips. It was difficult, she admitted when he asked, and it could be lonely, though she had her friend Buell and “husband.” Along with seclusion came a few perks though, she reiterated. Never had she had more time to think in her entire life, and it was both frightening and thrilling to realize where one’s own mind could go.

“You sound like a writer,” Mr. Landers mentioned, wrapping the tape around her hips, and being mindful, as Charlotte’s “husband” was behind the curtain, perusing the shop.

“Perhaps one day,” Charlotte said. “A drawer first though. Like my husband.”

“Oh, an artist. I must admit he didn’t strike me as such.”

“I don’t think artists are never who we think they are.” She did one last twirl as Mr. Landers took the last measurement of her limbs and jotted them down in a notebook. “He thinks of it as only a hobby, but if Saint Denis was covered in his drawings, no one would be able to look away.”

"Maybe one day," Mr. Landers said, wistful. "At any rate. I'll have these ready within five days."

Arthur didn’t hear her continue the ruse, hear him claiming him as her man, nor did he hear her compliment. She was half glad, half not (She thought a bit of a lopsided, self-deprecating grin he would give.) as she emerged from the back. He focused on a paisley, royal blue vest he pulled from one of the racks, gentle in his touches, and self-conscious that he was too rough for such a thing.

She asked him if he had taken a liking to it. “Never one for clothes really,” he admitted. “Color is nice though.”

“You like blue?”

“Nice as color as any.”

“You look dashing in blue,” she complimented, gesturing for the vest. She took it, held it up to his form. “Good fit,” she said. “Very rare does that happen. I’ll buy it for you if you like.”

“Charlotte, that’s not necessary,” he insisted, holding up his hands. “It’s too…well. I wouldn’t want to get it ruined.”

“It’s a good fabric. It’ll last. So long as you don’t run into a bayou.”

“Oh I don’t plan on it,” he assured, “but I can’t accept it. Really.”

“Oh yes you can,” she insisted. “I told you before, what’s mine is yours.” He was a gracious, humble guest as well. He didn’t take, only gave. She was going to have to take matters into her own hands, as if she hadn’t been doing that since Cal passed. Wordlessly and avoiding Arthur’s protests that she couldn’t possibly by the vest for him, she took it to the counter and made the purchase for the vest and her pants. As she asked for the vest to be boxed, Arthur scratched the back of his neck, a humble backing down from the battle he lost. She laughed at his bashfulness, his incessant protests. She had more money than she would ever need she said, and this was the least she could do. She even carried the box back to the hotel for him.

“Where on earth where you?” Alexander asked as they made it back to the hotel, Charlotte handing Arthur the box. “And you—" he pointed to Arthur. “What are you doing with her?”

“I had an errand to run,” she replied on Arthur’s behalf. “By the way. This is him.”

Alexander’s eyes grew wide. “You’re him? The one that…? Oh…shit.”

A gentleman doesn’t curse, Charlotte reminded her brother. Alexander and Arthur reacquainted with each other, Alexander thanking Arthur for “saving” Charlotte and Arthur answering the lady knew how to save herself. He only had a few tricks of the trade to pass. After the awkward reintroduction Alexander turned his attention back to Charlotte, telling her she should go back to her room, because apparently all proper Southern ladies napped during the afternoon.

She brushed him off. The day was young, and they were young enough. Alexander protested. “Charlotte—”

“Hush Alexander. You have more of father’s money to lose.”

Before he could quip, one of his mustached friends called Alexander away. Another game of poker, he announced, and that enticed Alexander away from her side. Far too easily, yet she wouldn’t complain. Yet when Charlotte turned back to Arthur, she found that in the ensuing conversation, he had turned his attention elsewhere.

“Karen,” he muttered. “Shit.”

He was far too preoccupied for her to remind him that a gentleman didn’t curse. Gentleman he was though he would deny it, though cowboy and man of the earth first. “Karen,” he said of a woman sitting at the bar, drinking a glass of whiskey the bartender keeping on with the pouring. Charlotte recalled the name, he mentioned it a few times when talking of his people and their matters during their picnic and fishing trip. He was worried about her, Arthur said then. He was told to bring her back to camp. He had to go talk to her.

Charlotte tentatively followed, Arthur asking Karen if she was alright. She was a pretty woman, what some circles would refer to as “curvy at the top,” Charlotte only knowing because some had called her as such. She wore her blonde hair in little ringlets and wore the same style outfit as Charlotte, though Karen wore pink where Charlotte preferred blue.

“There she is,” Arthur said, Karen barely acknowledging him, more preoccupied with drink.

“Arthur,” she said, voice only slightly slurred. “I see—smell I mean—that you took a bath. You’d forgotten for a while.”

Arthur turned the faintest red. “It happens.”

Charlotte faintly chuckled. He talked lowly, not because he didn’t want Charlotte to hear, but because the matters they discussed, missing “him,” and being sad, was all alright and normal, but Karen had people that wanted her back home. Karen ignored it, instead finally flitting her gaze to Charlotte and asking who the tall dark haired woman was.

“My name is Charlotte,” she introduced, and she was grateful Karen shook her outstretched hand. “I’m a friend of Arthur’s.”

“And here you were, saying you had no friends,” Karen waxed, taking another swig of her drink. “You are such a liar Arthur Morgan.”

“That’s certainly not true,” Charlotte maintained, swatting Arthur’s with the back of her hand for even having such a thought. Karen asked how they met and before Arthur could awkwardly explain, Charlotte bluntly informed her that he received a robbery tip. Instead of finding a household of money and jewelry, he found a crying widow by her husband’s grave.

“A widow? You?” Karen looked her up and down. “Huh.”

That was all some people would ever see, Charlotte was afraid. Charlotte Balfour, widow, would always be a letter upon her, a black W for widow instead of a scarlet A for Adulterer worn always on her back.

“You don’t care about…well…him being…uh…you know?” Karen asked.

She shook her head. “He met me, and he decided to help me. Now the least I can do is help him.”

“You’re naïve.”

Charlotte shrugged. “Some have said. But I’m happy, with my new friend.” And apparently, pretend husband too, when needed be.

“Karen, I really think—”

“I’m going back to camp,” she said with the waving of her hands, forgetting to pay the bartender, Arthur pulling out a five-dollar bill before he could protest and cause a scene. “Don’t you worry. I’m going. I know they told you to find me. I’m fine. Really. Just needed to think.”

“We can still go you know,” Arthur said, low. “It’s a really nice spot.”

“Maybe another time.”

Charlotte and Arthur, pretend husband and wife, stood awkwardly side by side in the silence Karen left behind. Charlotte tapped her foot against the wood floor. Arthur ran his hands through his newly trimmed hair.

He broke the silence before Charlotte could consider ordering a drink.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “She’s been through a lot.”

She wondered who the “he” was Arthur and Karen alluded to. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said.

He sighed. “Yeah.”

“Want to talk about it?”

He didn’t reply, not at first. Yet Charlotte reminded him the day was young, and so were they. Besides, she liked talking.

They talked. On a clear day, they sat by the water, and Arthur talked of Sean, sorrow, parting, and how he lived in a world that didn’t want him. That wasn’t the full truth though.

Charlotte did.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took a while, to be honest the next one will probably take a bit too, but thank you for sticking with it! (probably not as long though, :) )

Charlotte saw Arthur outside the theatre with a woman three days after their paths crossed again. It was the day before her father would arrive in town according to the correspondences he sent Alexander. To pass the time before what was sure to be quite a show, he suggested a trip to another show, one headed by a certain Aldridge T. Abbington. Charlotte may have adored trips to the Chicago theatres, but her reluctance to sit through a Vaudevillian display of girls in large skirts dancing the cancan while men hollered was quite a high reluctance. She went never the less after picking up her new trousers from the tailor and dropping them back off at the hotel in order chaperone her brother, finding Aldridge T. Abbington’s odd assortment of outcasts and theatrical acts much more charming than she had anticipated.

Would she have taken Arthur for one who appreciated Vaudeville or the theatre? She wasn’t sure she had an opinion on it, which was why she initially pushed back the notion that the man who whooped _yee-haw!_ from the crowd when the Fire Lady danced was in fact, her Arthur Morgan. Alexander jabbed her side after the woman with fire finished, wondering why she was hiding her face, but she couldn’t tell him it appeared that her quiet, usually subdued and practical cowboy could act like such a delighted little boy. It was fortunate so many people were cheering and applauding during the cancan routine—she would have sunk into her seat and into the earth if she thought that Arthur Morgan wanted to see those white petticoat skirts as Alexander did.

After the show however, Charlotte wondered to herself if Arthur was truly there, or if she had only imagined he was there, and her phantom-like imaginings of his honey and leather voice became so real that she had found his voice amongst the chorus of others who cheered. After they had met outside the hotel days ago and they accompanied each other with their small errands, Charlotte found she had so easily settled into a routine with him. It was natural to walk with him, talk with him, do something as innocuous as stand in a barbershop with him. He made the mundane an extraordinary adventure, and when she talked with him outside after they met Karen, with Arthur confessing what happened in Rhodes and rubbing his forehead with his broad hand when he spoke of Sean’s passing, Charlotte placed a delicate hand on his back. Perhaps she would have moved it in little circles as she used to do to Cal at night, back when he was overwhelmed with the occurrences at the bank, but she reframed. The small gesture, the small “I’m here,” was enough. She felt that was all Arthur needed to know. Even if they did not speak with each other, there was always the present feeling that they were there and present. They were two mountains who did not need to touch to know they stood side by side in the line of the sky. The simple intimacy of I’m here—it was the best and most wonderful. It was the quietest.

There was nothing quiet in the way her heart leapt when she saw Arthur, her Arthur, arm in arm with another woman.

Growing hot, wanting to be alone, she sent Alexander back to the hotel, feigning a few errands she had to run around town, and she would see him later. “Don’t stay out too late,” he forewarned, and she slapped his arm. She remained by the theatre after, the shame at herself somehow attaching her feet to the ground and making her unable to move. Ridiculous woman, she told herself. Silly, ridiculous. She shouldn’t have felt that way. It was unnatural. People could spend time with whoever they wanted. He had helped her, they were friends, but one could have more than one friend if they so choose. She didn’t, she only had Arthur—but that was her problem. She didn’t need to be embarrassed, or ashamed.

She saved his life, she remembered, stupidly so. He saved hers too, in a way. And maybe that was there friendship. And whatever was indebted or owed came to pass when she shot that man. Anything else he or she did after was a fortunate extension and prolonging.

“Charlotte?”

Any other time it would have been welcomed, Arthur finding his way back to her and standing by her side, but when she was so lost in her thoughts, standing through a plain of ridiculous notions, she wished he wouldn’t have found her.

“Ignore me,” she said, not looking at him yet, running her hand through her green skirt and swishing it around her feet. “I’m being silly, aren’t I? I know I am, in thinking that you just want to be my friend because you— _oh_.”

Arthur was wearing his blue vest. She could see that now that she had properly turned to face him, swishing her skirt around. It was the blue vest she bought him, coupled with a white buttoned-down shirt. He took his hat off as she regarded him, held it near his satchel.

“Charlotte, were you in the theatre?” he asked.

“With Alexander, yes,” she replied. Now that that was settled, that they were in the same place at the same time, she thought she would settle her wonder.

“Did you cheer?” she asked him.

His cheeks reddened. “Uh...”

“You did, didn’t you?”

The red color deepened. “No. Well—” he scratched the back of his neck. “Maybe.”

Proud, she placed a hand on her hip. “I thought so. Oh, don’t put your hat back on and hide from me, it was endearing.”

“Did you see who I was with?”

She didn’t respond, and that was her undoing. “You did, didn’t you?” he asked, and she once again responded in silence when she should have just admitted it. He held out his hand, as if he would reach for her, but thought better of it and it fell back to his side. Charlotte remained unmoved. She remained a bit, and stupidly so, ashamed.

“The vest really does suit you,” she said after uncomfortable, awkward, ridiculous moments tinged with regret, where to islands couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.

Centuries past. Arthur eventually did shift and move, closer to her side at that. And before he could think better of it, he said, “Mary and I live in the past.”

She understood. Sometimes she did too. He continued to confess, because she was, after all, his priest it seemed, that whenever he saw her again, he thought for the briefest moment that they would be the same again.

“But people don’t go back,” he said. “They only go forward. I have to live now, I guess.”

“You guess?”

He shook his head. “I know.”

She approached slowly, then stopped. The hand that rose to meet his face was slower still, still slow as she pressed her palm to his bearded face. His eyes fluttered closed.

“Come with me,” she said. “In the present.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere.”

There was only one place that could be everywhere. Side by side they walked, Charlotte leading him to places unknown. He let her lead, and when she took him to the spot she had in mind, she pointed with such grand theatricality that Aldridge T. Abbington would approve.

Arthur smiled, boyishly flecking at the wisps of hair that fell on his forehead. “The bookstore,” he said. “Clever.”

“The only place you can be anywhere, everywhere,” she replied, opening the door for him.

He inched closer. “Well…”

“Well what?”

She waited for him to speak. When he didn’t, she continued to be patient. “I like…” he managed, “I like it when we—"

“Excuse me.”

Their gazes broke as they shifted out of the way and let the red silken-clad, dark-haired woman in red who approached the shop inside, who let them know she was very irritated at Charlotte and Arthur’s chatter in front of the shop. She also, far more regrettably, ended whatever it was Arthur was going to say. It was a day of things unsaid it seemed. But she couldn’t live in the past anymore. Shrugging, she decided to move forward.

“Come now,” she said. “Let’s be anywhere.”

Inside they went, greeting the spectacle-wearing, white-haired bookseller. “People are going to think we’re married again,” Charlotte whispered.

“Well. Fine then. Fine by me. If it’s fine by you.”

“It is,” she said, wrapping an arm around him.

The theatre and the theatre’s spectacle rubbed off on him as well it seemed, he shrugged with an embellish that made her laugh. “Mr. Morgan,” she said, “Mrs. Morgan,” he said, the two reveling. Masqueraders, pretenders, actors, if that was what he wanted to be, then so be it. It was what she wanted to be. So they continued the show, almost danced from shelf to shelf, picking up volumes that looked interesting. Arthur didn’t scowl when Charlotte found a blue bound copy of _Romeo and Juliet,_ like Cal once did when they went about the town shopping. Arthur let her thumb through the book and only glanced at her with soft eyes as her fingers caressed the pages that contained favorite lines. _Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow_ she read, smiling to herself. It was as if the words could come to life if she imagined it properly. Arthur didn’t laugh or find her silly, ridiculous for believing in the power of beautiful words.

She did point out however that she knew the love couldn’t be real…Romeo and Juliet were both young, she said. Too young probably, and of course one couldn’t fall in love so quickly.

“Maybe you can. Maybe it is real.”

Arthur’s reply surprised her. She admitted as such. He was a gunslinger.

“Mrs. Morgan, you very well know I am a banker.”

“Oh yes,” she said, playing along, “quite a talented banker.”

He glanced around. They were alone between the shelves. It was only them, and with only them, his voice lowered. “Love has no reason,” he said. “It just is. Now hate…hate is easy.”

She was taken aback. “I don’t believe you mean that, Arthur Morgan.”

“I do,” he said, “but I have more to say, Charlotte Bal—Morgan.” He smirked. “Hate is easy, but once you love, love is easier, easier than hate.” He regarded the book. “Almost like Romeo and Juliet, I’d imagine.”

“Hate and love, yes,” Charlotte muttered. “Two sides of a coin. While Verona fights, Romeo and Juliet love.”

It could be so easy for him to hate Mary Linton, but he couldn’t. It could be so easy for Charlotte to hate Cal, for leaving her. She could even hate herself, for aiding and abetting his fate. That was a lie though, even if part of her did. Such regret she had, such a part that would always exist as some piece of her psyche. Yet despite everything, because of what happened and what she chose, she found herself. She found she was stronger than she ever imagined. She found Arthur.

She leaned against the shelves, taking in all of Arthur Morgan. Was he taking all of her in too? She got the feeling, but perhaps it was wishful threads of hope. She wanted to be taken in, and taken in by him. She would have preferred it if they were in her own paradise, not Saint Denis.

But they weren’t in Saint Denis. They were in the bookstore, which was anywhere, everywhere. He was taking her in everywhere.

“I have something to show you,” he said. “If you would follow me…”

Setting _Romeo and Juliet_ back she followed him, still playing the part of Mrs. Morgan. She played it well. He turned a corner, scanned the shelves. His finger brushed across every volume on the top shelf and then the second, before he found what he was searching for.

“ _Leaves of Grass_ ,” he said, “Walt Whitman. Hosea read this a while ago, told me to pick it up. Partly how I learned to read and write too.”

“Well, we should thank Mr. Whitman then.”

He chuckled. “We should. I don’t know who I’d be without my journal. It’s…calmed me.”

“How so?” she asked.

“I don’t know my own thoughts sometimes, until I write them down.”

She realized it was the same for her, more or less. “I don’t know my own thoughts until I’m alone. Or…”

But she did not continue and his brows furrowed, perplexed. He waited for her to finish.

“Here,” she said, finally. “Right here. That’s where it all makes sense.”

“The bookstore?”

She took all of Arthur Morgan in. “Yes,” she lied.

He swallowed, before flipping through _Leaves of Grass_ and pulling up a page to show her. “This is the poem, I used to read a lot” he said when he found what he was looking for. “Song of Myself.”

She took the book as he handed it to her. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

“Long, as poems go,” Arthur said. “But it’s good.”

She decided she would buy it and read it. She stood in line behind the woman clad in red silks, and by the time the woman was finished, Arthur was standing by her side. He was carrying a copy of _Romeo and Juliet._

“Thought I’d read it again,” he said.

“Again? You’ve read it before?”

They were called next before Arthur could reply. Charlotte searched for her money, stashed down in layers of taffeta, but before the clerk could grow impatient, Arthur pulled out his wallet and paid for both books with a five-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said, the clerk thanking him. Charlotte stared, but he paid it no mind until they exited together, walking back somewhere or other. She insisted he didn’t have to do such a thing.

“How much was the vest?” he asked.

“More than five dollars,” she admitted.

“Well, it’s the least I can do.”

“You could read to me.”

She meant to jest, but he took it seriously. After pretending to be Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, it followed he would tale it seriously. They sat by the water again, like they did days ago when he confessed his feelings about Sean, Karen, and the rest of the gang. She had no advice, other than she knew pain, but she got the feeling as she spoke to him that an ear to listen was all he needed. There they sat again, by the green blue water in Saint Denis in late afternoon. Arthur pulled to the balcony scene, began to read with “but soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” Charlotte laughed at his dramatic interpretation. He imitated an English accent well. Hers wasn’t as good—too nasally—but he laughed none the less as well. People that passed by dressed in stiff suits, tall hats and silk skirts, and Charlotte wondered if they new they were masquerading and play acting in a different way. Their way, however, certainly wasn’t as fun.

They finished the scene. He asked if she wanted him to read “Song of Myself.” She preferred to save it, for when she needed it most.

“You’re worried about your father, ain’t you?”

She nodded, holding _Leaves of Grass_ close to her chest. “All my life I’ve been a doll in a doll’s house…a plaything to move about how he sees fit. He told me it would the same when I got married, but it wasn’t. Cal was good. He respected. I chose him. And this…I chose this…I chose to move away. Now that Cal’s gone, I don’t know what he’ll do. Everything but drag me, I suppose..”

Arthur’s eyes were sorrowful. “It’s not right, to have your life not be yours. I’m sorry, I wish…”

She sighed. “Just…be here, listen,” she said. “You do already, so much. You truly do listen, when people talk to you.”

“You listen to me too.”

His leg was pressed against hers. They had been close all day in ways other than physical, and yet when they were sitting on a park bench, with Charlotte realizing how easy it would be for Arthur to wrap his arm around her, her heart danced and leapt.

But they didn’t have to touch to be close. She didn’t have to be touching him to feel like their souls touched.

“Alexander still found me,” she said, deprecating herself.

“You can do it.”

She met his gaze.

“With your father,” he clarified. “I know you can.”

“He was one of the reasons I ran away. I don’t—I don’t know if I can.”

Why was she still stubbornly holding onto her old self? Arthur wondered the same thing, though he didn’t say so. His eyes were as blue as the vest she bought him, and as blue as the sky and cornflowers as he studied her. He saw a Charlotte she wasn’t seeing.

“You can,” he promised, still seeing. “You know…here in the present…you…”

He stuck his hat back on. He hadn’t worn it since he had taken it off when they ran into each other. Still, Charlotte was the only one who could see his blue eyes.

“You’re tough,” he said. “In pants…in a dress. Agh, please don’t take it the wrong way.”

“I didn’t,” she assured with a chuckle.

“Good. Ah. Well. What I mean is—you’re brave. Here and now. That’s who you are.”

“You’re here in the present too.”

He didn’t say anything, but he did nod in agreement. The two of them, Arthur and Charlotte. They were in the present, and they were anywhere and everywhere. And when Charlotte met her father the next day, she told him she wasn’t going back to Chicago with him. She was too busy living in the present. 


	14. Chapter 14

_Just as tough in a dress as you are in pants. That’s right Charlotte. You tell him. Stay where you are. I like you right here._

_I like you right here._

He couldn’t think of the implications behind that, not at first. He was too busy watching Charlotte calmly hold out her hand—an iron fist wrapped in a white silk glove—stopping the man’s words right in the middle of a sentence she clearly had no desire to hear. His mouth hanging open in a dumb and dull shock, Charlotte grinned to herself. Arthur grinned too, watching from the fountain as Charlotte and her father stood on the veranda overlooking the backyard of the mayor's lavish home. It had to be her father. There was no other soul other than a rich man who thought his money dictated where his children should run off to that would have such hardness and entitlement toward their kin in their eyes. It reminded him in a way of how Mary and her own father acted, as if he had a grip on her and her life. It made his blood boil with Mary and it made his blood boil with Charlotte. Beyond that, the man’s looks pinned him as unmistakably her father. Arthur would have known anyway had he not run into Charlotte, Alexander, and Vale as he milled about Henri Lemieux’s yard for intel, before sweeping upstairs for the documents Dutch was looking for. Vale’s hair was as black as Charlotte’s with a beard just as dark— albeit peppered with grey. Both Charlotte and Alexander inherited that prominent nose. He remembered Charlotte confessed to him that she disliked her nose that was too much like her father’s, but he liked it. Told her so too. When he did, she blushed and said he was too kind to her.

He wasn’t kind. He only thought so and thought he would tell her. He didn’t know if it was kindness or something else anymore. He only knew one thing, he wanted to dance with Charlotte, so much so he thought he would burst at the seams if he didn’t stow her away near the fireworks and swell of violins to take her away. Oh, he was a horrible dancer, he knew it. At least Mary Beth had the kindness not to tell him whenever Dutch played the gramophone at camp and she asked him to dance, but it was true. However, he wanted to dance with Charlotte and he wanted to do what the two of them had been doing—have a masquerade. He had that first inkling after he ran into her at that damned ball Angelo Bronte invited them to, the damned ball he elected to stay at while all the others went back to camp, Lenny taking his gear for him, saying he’d find him in the hotel the next day. He wanted to be alone since he arrived at that party, there was something about being near so many people he didn’t know, people that weren’t his kin that made him prefer solitude. Yet as he stood then, smoking, the want to be alone with someone he knew and was dear ended up far greater.

He came to her side. Her father had gone off, no doubt to get into Bronte or Lemieux’s good graces, insert himself into the narrative that he was a powerful man with money who deserved something for it. Charlotte smiled, drifting to his side and sliding against him, a show of small affection that she couldn’t get away with earlier when she noticed him noticing her and smiled like the sun. With Charlotte alone, clad in a party dress of green taffeta and hair pulled elegantly up in what Mary referred to as a “French twist,” he offered his hand. He mourned the fact she wore milky white gloves. He liked the feel of her bare hands, calloused from riding and hunting. They betrayed her in this gilded world for a woman who had to take matters into her own hands to survive, not one who only attended party after party. _Let them betray you,_ he wanted to tell her. _Be proud of who you let yourself become, because so many people have cause to feel shame at what they let themselves become. Not you._

“Be quick,” she muttered, continuing to mold herself to his side. “Take me away before my father can find me.”

His lips met her ear. He could have kissed her cheek if he wanted, and he did want, but still he didn’t. “What on earth were you two on about?” he asked instead, curiosity getting the better of him.

“What do you think? He wants me back in Chicago. In Chicago there are far more parties to attend, far more men to meet. Of course, he doesn’t know I already have one…and I dare not let him go. Now, quick.” She wrapped her arm around his. “Let’s go by the fountain.”

He led her down where she asked, the crinoline of her dress preventing their bodies from that closeness he craved with Charlotte. _I already have one_ , she told him. She held some sort of possession over him and he could go drunk off of it, as he could get drunk to all things that were her. How she listened, how she rubbed his back, how they could pretend with one another and masquerade that was childlike and endearing, something he didn’t have when he was a boy. And when he took her in his arms for a dance and she let herself be pulled into his frame, he found a new addiction.

They danced. He was no good, he preferred the dance in her eyes, the dance of her gloved hand on the back of his neck, and the dance of his own hand splayed against her lower back, but they danced to the swell of violins and he it was a dance he enjoyed. They danced too slow for the tempo, and yet Charlotte’s green skirts accidentally whacked the skirts of several other women, and she laughed and apologized as Arthur accidentally bumped into some stuffy, bearded man. They danced and more fireworks went off. They alighted her face and already glowing eyes, illuminating that streak of silver. She was silver and gold in the fireworks. How could he look at the sky when he had her in his arms?

“I do think you dance divinely, Arthur Morgan,” she said, Arthur spinning her around in a flourish.

“Ah, you flatter me.”

“I never flatter,” she assured, pointing a finger at him. “I speak the truth.”

Mary would try to take him to parties and dance. Sometimes they’d be out and about in the town, and she would see a fine silk dress in a shop and look at it with longing. She would wish it could be hers, so Arthur may take her away to a party somewhere and sweep her away in it. Yet they had no need for such a thing. That wasn’t him, and maybe she tried to make him into something that wasn’t him with her constant want of a dance and party. It was her way of saying he was more than an outlaw, and he could move away from the life that was chosen for him. But he couldn’t dance.

It didn’t stop him then, with Charlotte. He was bad, clumsy and stiff, devoid of all the elegance of Charlotte, yet it wasn’t hard to keep moving as he held her, o matter how badly his feet moved to the melody. And he wanted to keep moving.

“Arthur? Are you alright?” she asked.

He loved she knew he had gone far off into his thoughts, journaling without writing it down. “Just thinking,” he replied, thoughtful. “Thinking of the past.”

“Ah.”

“What are you thinking about Charlotte?” he wondered.

“That past too.”

“Nice place, huh?”

“Sometimes.”

He understood. “Charlotte. I’m sorry.” He knew she still hurt. How could she not?

Her fingers tickled the back of his neck. “I don’t want to speak of the past, not anymore,” she said.

“Not even Cal?”

She grasped his shoulder. “We’re here,” she said. "Here. Now. That's what matters."

We’re here. The woman who shouldn’t have ever crept into his life crept into his mind, staying there and embedding herself in a place that he had thought became hollow. Who was Charlotte anyway, he wondered as she broke their dancing frame and snatched his hand, whisking him behind a gazebo. Who was she that she could do that and allow it, for no other reason that it was her, and she could take him anywhere she wanted?

“My father,” she muttered, holding onto his forearms, apologizing for such brusqueness, though there was no need. “He must be wondering where I ran off to. Shit, I don't want him to see.”

“It’s…”

His words broke with a cough, right when he was going to comment on her cursing and how he liked the way she cursed. But she had taken him away and in the aftermath he found himself winded by that and the dancing. The spell was a little longer than what should be normal, but maybe they were dancing longer than he thought. Concerned, Charlotte held onto him as the fit lessened.

He cursed himself, muttering that he must have given them away.

“Just to Alexander.”

Just in time, Alexander emerged from behind the gazebo, standing next to them. Arthur couldn’t hide his annoyance. At least it was Alexander and not their father, but dammit, he wanted Charlotte alone and the time he had with her wasn’t enough. Beginning their relationship by trekking to her isolated home had spoiled him. He had her to himself there. In the city other people tried to claw at her.

“You should do something about that cough,” Alexander said severely to Arthur, arms crossed. His brown suit looked too big for him, matching bowtie too big under his chin.

“Ain’t nothing to be done,” he answered. “I smoke. Lots of people who smoke cough.”

On cue, Alexander took out a pack and stroked a match, lighting one right there. “I don’t.” Behind the smoke, he turned his attention to Charlotte. “Father is looking for you,” he said, puffing and clouding them. “He wanted to introduce you to someone.”

“I told him I’m not getting married again.”

Alexander shrugged. “That’s your choice,” he said with just enough conviction that Arthur believed he believed it.

Alexander sighed. “I can’t tell him that though,” he said sadly. “Only you can.”

“I told him a thousand times. He won’t believe me. What am I going to have to do to make him believe me Alexander?” She asked, exasperated. “Perhaps he’ll listen to you.”

“Because I’m a man?”

She pursed her lips. Not at Alexander, but at the whole damn world. She held out her hand, snapped at her brother. “Light me a cigarette,” she demanded.

When he was too slow for her, she snatched the pack right out of her brother’s hands. Alexander was baffled but otherwise obeyed the rest of her command without any reluctance, Charlotte leaning in so he could light her cigarette with a new match he lit. He offered Arthur one as well. He accepted. Charlotte lit his cigarette with her own.

“Didn’t know you smoked,” Arthur said.

“Me neither.”

“Our good old father,” Alexander said with clear disdain. “His doing.”

They all smoked in silence, until Charlotte said, “perhaps I’ll make him listen.”

“You certainly can,” Alexander said with no ill will or irony. Yet Charlotte wasn’t the same Charlotte from earlier, the Charlotte that danced. And Arthur itched to dance again. That was most surprising of all, even more surprising than his want to take her away somewhere where they could just be without anyone else. To take her away, somewhere far off, anywhere and everywhere…

“Alexander, we’re leaving.”

It was Charlotte who spoke, not Arthur. “Oh, are you?” Alexander asked, dully looking at Arthur, as if he half-expected him to say something contrary, yet Arthur didn’t reply. On his part, he was amazed at how of one soul they were, one soul and one mind.

“Well, do you want to leave Charlotte? Really?” Alexander asked.

She peered at Arthur, mischief in her eyes. He nodded, his silent, take me away. Yes, that was Charlotte, his Charlotte.

“Yes,” she said to Alexander, grinning and not looking away from Arthur. “Tell father I’m alright. I’m alive, and I have no plans on ruining his plans for me.”

“We all know that is a bold-faced lie.”

She chuckled, lightly hitting Alexander on the shoulder. “You’re right,” she assured, “it is.”

“Well, go off now. He’s over there, talking to Angelo Bronte. I can stall, but only for a little. So…”

She kissed Alexander on the cheek before Arthur took Charlotte’s hand. Now they really had to go—the last thing he wanted was questions from Angelo Bronte. She seemed to understand—he loved that she knew thing, and he could talk to her in their own language. It continued as thy left the mansion and he began to call for a carriage, but she surprised him by pushing his hand down.

“Walk me home,” she asked of him.

He couldn’t walk her all the way from Saint Denis to past Annesburg, but he could walk her to her hotel. He didn’t want to though. If he brought her back home, he would have to leave her, and he was filled with memories of how it stung when last they parted. He didn’t want to leave her.

He found himself taking her hand and squeezing. In turn, she placed her gloved hand on his cheek. He wrapped his hand around her delicate wrist. He searched in her eyes for affirmation before he peeled the glove off. She gave at his want, his want to feel her and not the masquerade.

“My hand is so rough,” she said, almost mournfully.

“Not to me.”

He kissed her hand, as calloused as his own. He could have kissed her then, he understood later. She held softness in her eyes, and her lips were slightly parted with a longing he knew and didn’t know, because it was Charlotte’s longing, and Charlotte was both new and familiar to him. Both were so equally comforting.

He didn’t kiss her. Not then. Yet he did understand that there was one thing that was abundantly clear.

Their night together wouldn’t end after he walked her home. He liked her where she was too much.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow guys, really sorry for the long wait. To be very honest I had lost a tiny bit of inspiration for this story, but I'm gradually getting back. (I also am having a walk through Game of Thrones land and been writing fic for that, lol. )We're also about halfway done with this story, maybe a bit more, so there's also that <3 As always, thank you for reading!

Arthur hesitated. About to turn the doorknob to her room, he stood for a moment before subtly shaking his head. It worked well enough to voice his own disapproval at the situation without using the words. There he was and there she was, ready to turn in for the night, and he was going to play the gentleman, find somewhere else to stay the night. She saw a plan cycle through his mind—perhaps he had thoughts to ride back to wherever it was his people were. Selfishly she wanted to tell him, you don’t belong to them, not the way you do to me, but it was preposterous. People shouldn’t belong to people. It wasn’t right that her father should control her, it wasn’t right to tell Arthur to stay if he wanted to go. Even if she did want him right where he was, with her.

“As far as they know, we’re married,” she pointed out, wondering if he was worried about what other people would say or think. “Don’t worry of besmirching my honor—”

“It ain’t that. Well, it—” He stopped, clearing the jumbled thoughts of his head, trying to make them into something coherent. It was as Charlotte was, her mind was a flurry of Cal, of her home, of the wildflowers that grew near Annesburg, of her father and brother and her party, of the two of them. Yet one thought soared above all else. She didn’t want to be alone. She was tired of it, needed to grow in his sun.

“I don’t want the night to stop,” she said, begged even, tugging on his arm. “I asked you to stay with me, here, in my room.”

“What do you want with this?” he asked, not accusing, only needing to know. He would never accuse. And, if she were honest, the two of them…

Her want was simple. “To continue on.”

“How?”

He spoke lowly. She wasn’t sure herself, if she wanted to be Arthur Morgan’s lover or friend, or both. She missed Cal at night still, longed not for a partner she did when she was younger, but for him to be alive again. Intermingled with that, was her want for Arthur. Sometimes she wasn’t sure if it was lover or friend, or both.

“However we choose,” she said.

She opened the door. “Come into my room,” she beckoned, “before anyone realizes we’re not who we say we are.”

Wordlessly, Arthur obeyed. They said nothing but said everything as Charlotte took the right side of the bed, and Arthur took the left. He kept his back toward her as she did hers as they readied themselves. Though she took up her usual routine, she was overly meticulous in undressing, slowly allowing each strand of her corset to unlace before it fell to the floor. Petticoats fell, the blue silk fell, and her hair came undone, falling behind her back. She put on her nightdress, feeling him freeze as she did, the movement only continuing when she sat back down on the bed, laying against her side. Soon after, he followed, and she caught a glimpse of his red long johns. Not the most handsome or becoming thing to wear—Cal usually wore pajamas that would often fall to the floor after he put them on, but he was modest. She appreciated it. He took up space in her bed, but he was aware of it, moving to the edge and giving her more room.

“Arthur—”

“I can leave. I—”

“I wasn’t going to tell you to leave,” she said evenly, bemused by his bashfulness. “It’s only, there’s no need to stay all the way at the edge. You’ll fall, right in the middle of the night. Come closer.”

He came closer, if only just. She glanced at him, his blue eyes trailed straight to the ceiling, looking like he wanted to say something, but refraining. If he wouldn’t speak, she would. He always let her speak, make her own choices. He was good. She wouldn’t ever allow anyone who wasn’t good to her bed.

“I wouldn’t have asked you to stay with me, only to turn you out,” she said. “I want you here.”

To do what? He would have asked, had he not been a gentleman and held a touch of decorum. That must have been why he didn’t correct the clerk downstairs when he assumed the two of them were husband and wife. A fine touch of irony—they had been masquerading as such on and off and there they were, mistaken as such. The charade became their mask, and since hardly anyone had to care to peel off the façade, they remained as such to the eyes of those who looked. So up the stairs they went, into her bed they went as husband, as wife.

“Charlotte…”

“I’m frightened.”

Their eyes met. Quiet centuries past, then quiet days and quiet nights. She thought the confession would clear the air, but perhaps she was mistaken. Even she didn’t know, until she had spoken the words. Yet it was true, she was frightened. Frightened and thrilled, believing she was ready for whatever was to come, worried she wouldn’t get what she couldn’t form words to. _What do I want? What do I want? To be married again?_

“No,” he said at last, quiet and proud, reminding her of who he was. “You’re not afraid. You would have never left your old life, never have come here, to Saint Denis. You wouldn’t have asked me to stay.”

“I’m afraid for you,” she muttered, clarifying.

Their foreheads touched. There was a sharp intake of breath as his calloused hand lightly caressed hers. “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he promised.

They were gazing, contemplating. Sleeping alone for so long in her piece of earth and Eden made her realize she wasn’t fit for sleeping alone. She liked the anchor of another next to her, the soft breathing, the warmth of brown eyes. Is that what I want, Cal again? She didn’t think so. And Arthur’s eyes were blue, but still warm. His hair was in disarray, his hand still on hers, and there wasn’t the slightest inclination to let go.

But he would let go, eventually. He always did. He was a wanderer, not meant to settle down, not meant to develop roots. She was a wallflower, an Irish rose in the garden. Dainty, delicate, afraid. Once.

She turned herself into a wildflower. Wildflowers didn’t care where they grew. Wildflowers could plant themselves near wanderers.

He squeezed her hand. She bit her lip, bit back her moan. He touched her everywhere but he only touched her at the hand. His eyes swept down her frame, and she told him what she was afraid of, arriving at a clarity finally, that this would only be temporary, that they were only temporary. But maybe love was only supposed to be temporary. The passion of lovers was meant only to burn for a few singular moments, but for those moments it was meant to be radiant and shining, ethereal. That’s how it was with Cal. It frightened her, like so many things. If she were to have Arthur, she would never want it to be temporary.

He sighed, drinking her in. Her dark hair painted the white pillow, and he took in every strand, every stroke. Her heart pounded in her chest and she could almost hear his own, pounding just as hard. With touches Cal made her aware she was a woman, aware she wanted to be touched, but Arthur did it with only his eyes. She cursed herself for comparing—she should never. She loved before, and was bent though not broken from what happened. She was ready.

Her hand was through his hair. Arthur. Fingers swept down her shoulder, Arthur. She closed her eyes. And yet—

“Don’t kiss me now,” she whispered. “Wait.”

He kissed not her lips with his, but his fingertips kissed the planes of her face, along with the curve of her jaw, the soft widow’s peak on her forehead, her lips. She wanted to wait until she saw only him, not what was lost. She wanted to wait for the kiss to be from Arthur, not the ghost. She wanted to feel only him.

“We can,” Arthur muttered. “If everything is temporary.”

“I don’t want to believe that,” she admitted.

“Me neither.”

“Then make every last moment last.”

She outstretched her arms, and he took a moment before he accepted. He was pressed against her body, from torso to the barest glide of her leg, and she was brazen in her want to wrap her legs around his, but she only sighed at the feel of his stubble against her collar and shoulder, content herself with that. He tried to move away, ashamed of the roughness, but she could be just as rough. She kept him where he was. Their foreheads touched, their noses bumped against each other, and Charlotte, blissful, rolled her head against the pillow. Their lips brushed together in a kiss but not a kiss.

She embraced him harder. Scratched his back with her barely there nails, pulled his hair. He grunted and yes, she felt him against her, aroused and in want of her. How easily could she do it, how she would have said yes if he asked, but she made herself content and he made himself content, and even when he realized what was happening, that he knew and he moved away in shame, she kept her side pressed against his. They remained like that, and he spoke of things he had to tell her, fears that he had that he wanted to tell her, but didn’t want to—at least not now. He was good at ruining things, he explained. Ruining this would ruin him.

“You’ve ruined nothing Arthur, you’ve inspired. Look at me.”

He grasped her hand. But still, morning suited the truth, where she would see Arthur, and only him. That night was for lovers, for softness and being. Charlotte took his hand, kissed the top. His arms opened and she listened to his beating heart. When she fell asleep, it was an eternity and an instant, his heartbeat and gentle breathing like waves on the water, and she was the ship the waves carried home. She woke first, when the first rays of dawn made the room glow. He followed soon after, smiling when he saw her peering over his sleeping form. “Wait a minute,” he beckoned before Charlotte could mention it was the morning and time for secrets and fears revealed. Though, the more she languished in morning, the more she was beginning to believe that the morning was also for lovers. She waited for Arthur, and he stooped over and grabbed his discarded coat from last night. He rummaged around until he found his journal and pencil, smiling and proud of himself for having the foresight to leave it with him and not in his knapsack, to be left behind at camp. He couldn’t have known he’d see Charlotte in early morning, with her hair in disarray on the pillow, night gown unbuttoned and uncorseted, and smiling at him. Yet he had it with him, and because he was a wanderer, he recorded moments that mattered to him, made them less temporary. He sketched her in the morning, careful in his flicks of pencil and light strokes. He showed it to her after he was done, smiling and languishing and happy, because she was near him. She had never looked so much like Charlotte.

He closed the journal, and she stroked his cheek, kissing without kissing. He confessed he was afraid as she admitted last night, but of what he didn’t know. He could see the threads but not form words to the images he saw. Yet there was one he did know, because he always feared it, even when he was happy.

“Loss,” he muttered. Even if all things were temporary and he knew that, it was loss he feared. It was the same for her.

“Then let me stay with you.”

He peeked at her from behind golden lashes. He asked to hear it again, he must have misheard. He didn’t. She wanted to stay with him. She wanted to go with him to camp, be there for him when he was tired, kiss him to remind him he was a good man.

“I can kiss you,” you know, she said. “If you want.”

“Kiss? Charlotte…”

“Yes,” she whispered, breaking the distance between them. “Kiss.” She saw only him, wanted only him. That was how she knew.

He was Arthur that she saw, not anything or anyone she had lost, but what she wanted to gain. He was needy as he returned her affection, gripped her shoulders and brought her closer. Then they were tumbling on the bed, and her arms were welcoming and inviting. She needed him, needed the two of them. He pulled off straps of her gown, she pushed down the long johns, laughing as he cursed and had to stand up to get them off. He was Arthur, she kept telling him, and she was Charlotte, as he said. They were exactly what they wanted and what they needed. Not two lost souls, but a wildflower and a wanderer. He wandered her body, she clung and she held, and when it was over, she told him she was serious, it wasn’t just a mad want, though he was handsome and yes she had thought about him at night. But it was the truth, she had always told the truth to him. She wasn’t going to leave, so long as he had a place. He was a wanderer but she could plant herself near him.

“Don’t,” he asked of her in turn. “Stay.”

“So long as you don’t.”

The wanderer promised, he would wander with her, the wildflower. The wildflower kissed him, once more, and more. They wandered again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think the next chapter will take as long as this, but please be patient with me, I do still care about Arthur and Charlotte and intend to finish <3

**Author's Note:**

> If you are so inclined, my tumblr is @a-shakespearean-in-paris! I post updates, thoughts, various fandoms, and Arthur Morgan :)


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